


The Vault 2018

by Chronolith



Category: Soul Eater, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Artificial Intelligence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, M/M, Major Character Injury, meister Allura, weapon lance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 16:26:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 91,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17247533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: All the works in progress I am not going to finish or come back to. Consider it writer end-of-year cleaning for my brain. Each chapter is a story that I've abandoned. Some I might come back and dust off and continue, but most the muse has kicked to the curb and refuses to even contemplate. Ah well.watch the notes in the beginning of the chapter





	1. Kotov Syndrome

**Author's Note:**

> a _Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy_ au that I still love but don't have the brain space to really continue. Allura cast as George Smiley because I love her.

Kotov Syndrome

Chapter 1: Leaving the Party

Alfor regards the slip of paper before him with a sort of bemused detachment that can only come when a man regards the letter of his own execution delivered via antiquated methods. His signature is a subtle, elegant thing written in a hand that does not shake. 

They all watch him with varying degrees of dazed distress. 

“I,” Pidge starts and then swallows hard before saying very quickly: “I wish I could have done more.”

“My dear girl,” Alfor says gently. “You did all you could.”

Pidge looks down and way from him blinking rapidly. 

Lotor shifts slightly, deliberately and they all turn to regard him. “What about Allura?” he asks with impressive disinterest in the answer.

“Allura,” Alfor says with a type of cool, collected calm that she has admired all her life, “is leaving with me.”

It’s shock that keeps her face perfectly neutral—a learned response ingrained in her over the course of the war and the subsequent long, long detente between Altea and Diabazaal that has left them all a little less comfortable in their skins and a little more bloodstained under their fingernails. 

Pidge won’t look at her, slides her gaze away to the side like there’s a dirty secret being aired that she shouldn’t know. Hunk has on his war-face, the blank one full of distrust that hides his distress. Lotor blinks, slow and thoughtful, a sympathetic little smile on his thin lips. Keith just catches her gaze and cocks his head to the side, a little ‘ah, well, what can you do’ gesture that she honestly appreciates more than any of them.

But then, it had been Shiro’s capture, breaking and—she hopes—death (death so much better to imagine than betrayal) on Arus 6 that had started this entire mess. If anyone understands the complexity of emotion swirling just under a calm façade, it’d be Keith.

She gives him a very small nod in return.

Alfor stands, slides the folders and their datapads into a tidy pile and gives them an affectionate little pat. He surveys the room briefly, an impressively cold consideration for a man regarding his colleagues of nearly two decades, and gives them all a little smile. “It’s your show now, children,” he says softly. “Try not to cock it up.” 

The world seems very far away as she stands, smooths down her suit, and follows her mentor-predecessor-liege-lord out the door. 

///

Retirement, Allura decides about a week in, is very boring.

It itches under her skin like a rash, like a creeping illness that she cannot expunge from her veins, and she resents it with an intensity she has resented little else in her life. There is an endless _monotony_ to it all that she finds distasteful. She wakes up in her comfortable, if worn, bed. Takes a short, rather cold, swim in the river. Has a tasteful, if bland, breakfast. And then rattles about annoyed with herself for the rest of the day. Nothing holds her attention for much longer than the span of an hour, if that, and she finds herself running through old training scenarios just for something to keep her mind occupied.

 _Scenario one_ : you are tasked with embedding an agent into a heavily fortified, military-controlled city. Circumstances oblige you to air-drop the agent rather than attempting a more sensible ground-insertion. How do you minimize the chances of your agent being detected and, subsequently, blown out of the sky?

 _Answer_ : bomb it. Light it up like the Fifth of November using high-orbital barrage. Target administrative centers and infrastructure, government buildings, hospitals, sewage works, and storage works to ensure maximum chaos and enemy confusion. Disrupt as many networks—information, command, logistics—as possible. In the middle of the mess no one will notice one individual parachuting in under the cover fire. Try not to hit your own man, rather defeats the purpose.

 _Scenario two_ : a hostile military commander contacts you with an offer of service. They want to come over and have information of value—treasure. They are, unfortunately, under surveillance and significant suspicion. How do you extract them (or at least the information) without compromising your agents in the field?

 _Answer_ : …

Allura leaves off that one. Too close to home, for one thing—the loss of Shiro—and indeed the entirety of the eastern network from Arus 6 to Ilos—still burns in her throat like bad acid reflux.

She drops the datapad on her desk—throws it, really—in a huff of poor temper and stares out the window. She’s being morose and knows it but lacks any ability to do anything about it. The sudden lack of access that comes with being retired rankles in a manner she’d not expected. Reduced to reading bloody _newsfeeds_ for information she used to get hours if not weeks ahead of the general populace. Forced to watch commentators with their heads so far up their own arses that they couldn’t tell the difference between a maggoty turd and a decent policy debate issues she used to consider her particular domain. 

It _galls_ her. 

The newsfeed blinks cheerily up at her. Blares the title “House of Commons Debates the Military-Industrial Complex Appropriation” in a manner she frankly finds rather cheeky.

Bloody military-industrial complex her left arse cheek. As if the commentators knew even half of the shell game that went into hiding what and how the Altean government decides to fund its ongoing cold war with the Galra. 

It’s a war of ideology and aesthetics more than anything else, she thinks to herself moodily, the idea of strict social hierarchy and enforced public service, with each member of society responsible to each other in a complex network of kinship and personal debt bonds stacked against Altean ideals of individual development and freedom. It’s a messy business, really, with both sides claiming the moral high ground.

And yet.

And yet, her heart still picks up with patriotic and dedicated fervor at the ideals of Altea: _liberte_ , _fraternite_ , _egalite_. The idea that no Altean citizen held a status any higher than another—that each member has as much right to opine, to decide, to express themselves as another still sings to her with a siren’s lure. As much as she accepts that her society fails those ideals as often as it meets them, she still finds it beautiful, and misses being in its service the way she might miss a limb.

With a sigh she pulls the datapad back towards her and thumbs idly through the newsfeeds—trying to find the hidden string between events like she’s some rank novice being put through her paces.

At the very least, it’s something to do.

///

Retirement does not become any easier to bear at one month than it was at one week.

The tedium of it drags on like a churlish houseguest and she finds herself watching the eastern edges of Altean space more out of habit than expectation. Allura’s life is a run on habit. She fits a tiny scrap of paper between her door and the jam, right below sightline and dark enough to blend with the wood, every time she goes out. She sits with her back to the wall at her local café and sips strong black coffee as she watches people. She ties together the strings of their messy lives, finds the right levers to pull if she ever needed them, and not quite sulks. Some small, deeply foolish piece of herself holds out hope that there will come a call on her personal transponder. An urgent message that she is needed, at once, and it is time to put away the trappings of civilian life.

No such call, of course, ever comes.

Keith does—at random times and random hours. 

Allura finds him standing on her doorstep hollow-eyed and dripping with rain water the first time. He blinks at her as if he’s not entirely certain how he’s managed to fetch up at the door to her respectable little flat. She is no better and they stare at each other for a long moment in mutual bemusement until he sneezes, a tiny little thing, and she laughs.

“You’d best come in,” she tells him. “Before you collapse from consumption.”

“That would be difficult to explain,” he says as he follows her. 

There’s a bit of an awkward moment in the entry hall where she tries to hand him a towel while he tries to take off his sodden jacket, and they do a stilted little dance around each other. They get it worked out in the end, though her floors will require a good scrubbing afterward.

“Are you certain you should be here?” She asks.

He quirks an eyebrow at her. “Am I not allowed to visit a friend?”

Allura spreads her hands. “I am in disgrace, am I not?”

Keith laughs softly under his breath. “I think most of the team accept that as Control being … well, himself.”

She hums her agreement. Alfor had gotten his nickname honestly after all. She makes tea on some half-remembered instinct that it is what one does when there’s a guest. Tea and, she thinks, those little sandwiches with the corners cut off. Keith watches her move about her modest kitchen with an odd smile.

“I’m only drinking that,” he says with a nod to the pot that steams gently, “if there’s whiskey in it.”

She pulls a bottle down without looking and plunks it on the table. Keith coughs out another of his odd little half-laughs and reaches for the bottle before the tea. Allura smacks his hands a way with a faint _tsk_ and pours him a respectable cup. “We aren’t in the middle of the war anymore,” she tells him. “We can pretend to be civilized.”

“If you say so,” he concedes and then fills the rest of the little cup up with the good stuff she’s been saving since they’d signed the first peace treaty. That had been a good day.

“I do,” she says primly and then fills her cup the same way.

“Never thought you’d be one for a social call,” she comments after a respectful little silence where they drink their tea/whiskey and pretend not to watch each other for tells.

He twitches a shoulder. “I can’t visit a friend?” he repeats.

Allura watches him for a long time and slowly cocks her head to the side.

Keith blows out a breath, making his messy bangs flutter. “I miss him,” he says softly. He makes a little gesture. “You would think that after the war, with the complete cock-up that was Operation Testify, and the way he blew our entire network that—”

She catches his hand when he makes another sharp gesture and pulls it down to the table. Holds it soft and still.

They sit in her little kitchen as the night storms around them in silence for a very long time.

///

After six months of retirement Allura thinks that she has either become completely numb to the world around her or gone quietly mad with desperation to be doing something. Anything.

She’s done every wellness check that she’d been putting off for the past ancients only knew how long. Went clothes shopping and replaced all her doughty suits. Gotten a new haircut and let her stylist fuss at her a bit about it. It falls in gentle waves to her hips, delicately framing her face, and all-in-all its a careful, complicated feminine style she’s not had since before the war. She’s not sure how she feels about it, if she’s entirely honest, and she spends entirely too long staring at herself in the mirror in mute bewilderment.

Keith, when he sees her all freshly coifed, raises one eyebrow at her slowly. 

“I still have a very good right hook,” she tells him. “If you get smart.”

He holds up his hands in surrender. “That’s more the purview of McClain, isn’t it?” He says with his little half-smile. “I imagine you don’t miss that.”

“Will you judge me terribly if I say that sometimes I do?” She asks.

His smile is small and soft and fond. “No,” he says. “I won’t.”

///

On the one-year anniversary of her retirement Keith turns up at her flat much the same way he had the first time—bedraggled, slightly confused, and apprehensive. He’s got a bottle of wine tucked under one arm and the most wretched boutique of flowers she’s ever seen.

She gives him a deeply skeptical look and he sneezes. “Come in,” she says. “Before you die on my doorstep.”

“I’d at least get to the alley around the corner,” he says as he squeezes past her. “Save you from having to phone ‘round to the police.”

“Considerate of you,” she says as he eels out of his jacket. She takes it from him with a moue of distaste. “Are you ever going to replace this thing.”

“Shiro gave it to me,” he says and looks at her.

Allura sighs and folds it carefully onto a hanger and leaves it to drip all over her nice hardwood floor. She can sand and re-varnish later, if need be. She takes the flowers from him without comment. He follows after her like a puppy even though by this point he knows her little flat as well as she does.

“I heard flowers are traditional,” he says by way of apology. “For celebrating retirements.”

She flicks water from the faucet at him and he dances out of the way with a sly little grin. “Brat,” she says. “I can toss you right back out into the rain.”

“But you won’t,” he says.

“I might, depends on how good the wine is,” she tells him sternly.

Keith holds out the bottle wordlessly. It’s tidy little thing of one of the Olkarian vintages and a very good year from before the war. She blinks at it, surprised. “Does it past muster,” he asks her. “Colonel?”

“It does, Lieutenant Colonel,” she tells him with the same officious tone. She hands him the bottle to open while she scrounges up some mismatched stemless wine glasses. He gets the bottle open with a satisfying little pop of the cork. He fills her glass with the seriousness that would have done any maître proud. 

“Happy one-year retirement anniversary,” he tells her as he settles in across from her. “Congratulations on not going entirely around the bend.”

“Fuck off,” she responds kindly. She swirls the wine in her glass before taking a dainty sip. “They never tell you how intensely dull civilian life turns out to be.”

“Miss it?” he asks. 

Allura gives him a look and he laughs under his breath. “Well,” she says as she considers her wine. “It has given me time to perfect my chess game, I suppose.”

“They do tell you it is the small joys that make life worth living,” he says.

Allura considers this. “Do you ever want to find this mysterious ‘they’ sometimes,” she asks thoughtfully, “and take their knees out with a baseball bat?”

Keith laughs so hard he has to put his head against her scarred kitchen table.

He collects himself eventually and they slip into easy and idle conversation—war reminiscences and odd stories. There’s a game they play between themselves, two truths and a lie, and they smirk at each other every time the other guesses wrong. 

But this time something is very subtly off. Keith’s eyes flicker to the windows, to the tea kettle, to her face a little too often. His breathing is slow and calm and controlled in that very specific way one only gets when one does directed breathing exercises. He says nothing when she stands, pulls the blinds closed and turns on the kettle.

Allura runs her fingers under the counter and hits the switch that sends the encryption and dampening protocols—off-brand, open-sourced, and just this side of legal—quietly buzzing into existence.

She sits back down across from him. “Kitchen talk?” She asks. 

Keith doesn’t laugh. He rubs his knuckles against his mouth and leans back in his seat as he stares at her in silent assessment. After a while he sighs. “Kitchen talk,” he agrees. 

The kettle screams, startling neither of them, and she goes to pour them both large mugs. He takes his without a word and rubs a thumb along its chipped edge. Allura settles in across from him and blows gently across the top of her mug. He watches her for a long time with little furrow between his brows.

“You aren’t going to press?” He asks.

“I have time for you to work yourself around to it,” she says and then gives him a half-shrug, his own little abortive gesture fit awkwardly onto her frame. “I’m told that’s one of the perks of retirement: time.”

Keith rubs his mouth again and doesn’t laugh. He puts his mug down with a serious little clink against the wood and draws in a shaking breath. “You are going to think that I am going crazy.”

She tilts her head to the side and takes a sip of tea. “Insanity is one of the dangers of the job,” she says. “That’s the reason there’s yearly psychiatric evaluations.”

He gives her a very flat look. “I am being serious.”

“So am I,” she says. “Excessive paranoia,” she quotes, “it’s one of the accusations that they used to oust Control, remember?”

She’s treated to the rare sight of Keith Kogane going ashy with an odd guilty twitch to his eyes. She reaches out and pats his hand, making him startle. “I don’t blame you for what happened,” she says gently. “I, Alfor,” she looks away. “There’s nothing you could have done in the aftermath of Operation Testify but burn on the pyre with us.”

Keith turns his hand over in hers and nearly grinds her knuckles to dust in his grip. “He was _right_ ,” Keith hisses. “Alfor was _right_ to be suspicious of what happened. There’s no way that Shiro would have betrayed us. There has to have been—” Keith blinks rapidly and looks away for a moment. “He was betrayed.”

Allura’s heart cracks a little around the edges. Of all the things left untainted by the long cold war they’d found themselves in with the Galra, Keith’s utter devotion to Shiro persisted. She squeezes his hand back. “Keith,” she starts before he waves her into silence.

“I know how I sound,” Keith says bitterly. “Poor lovelorn Keith, refusing to believe that we have been betrayed. I _know_ ,” he looks up at Allura from beneath his bangs and his gaze is very fierce. “But I’m not the only one who’s thought it, am I?” He bites out the question, half bitterness half desperate need for confirmation. “There’s a mole.”

She looks at where he grips her hand like a drowning man.

“No,” she says quietly. “You aren’t the only one.”

He sits back and nods to himself. “There’s a mole,” he repeats.

///

Allura’s watching some very serious, very stupid newsfeed when the call comes. The feed doesn’t intend to be stupid, indeed all of the commentators are quite well-regarded public intellectuals; however, they are all also, and this is terribly unfortunate, horribly wrong in every way it is possible to be wrong. It’s a crisp, professional little knock.

She blinks a little at the sound and turns very slowly to consider her front door. 

The knock comes again, a brisk little two-beat demand for attention against the hardwood.

With a sigh she levers herself out of her comfortable if ratty sectional. She’s prepared to chase off some child looking to sell cookies or chocolate or whatever it is they had clenched in their little hands and told to peddle because idiots couldn’t look beyond two extra caegar in their wallets to properly fund their schools. Allura puts a hand on the doorknob and prepares herself to gently, but firmly shoo away some adorable little moppet. It is not a precious little poppet standing on her step, but rather one ashen-faced youngish man in a well-tailored suit.

A ball of ice forms low in Allura’s stomach as the world spins down into tight focus. “McClain,” she says, and if her voice is clipped and harsh, well, that’s not so unusual for them.

“Ma’am, Allura,” Lance’s voice breaks and he swallows hard. “Control, I mean, Mr. Alfor—”

Allura nods softly, slowly, and mostly to herself as he rambles. “I’d best get my coat then.”

She gently closes the door in his face and then leans her forehead against it for a long breath. Her coat is a long, drab-gray, shapeless thing with a great deal of pockets. Lotor once commented that it made her look a bit like a homeless washerwoman, but she’s had it since the war. The first time Alfor had seen her in it—bunkered down outside of the capitol on Reiphod as the Galra seeded the skies with anti-grav cluster mines—he’d turned the collar up to frame her face and chucked her under the chin. “Brave little soldier-girl,” he’d said with a sad smile. Allura rather thinks she’d like to be buried in this coat.

Allura does her hair up in a tight bun at the base of neck, pulls on her coat, and opens up the door. “You’re driving,” she says as she brushes past him. Lance stares after her. “Come along, McClain, ministers don’t like to be kept waiting.”

“I didn’t even—” he starts and then shakes his head with a rueful smile. “Ma’am.”

He holds open the door for her like a perfect gentleman and closes it firmly once she’s slid inside. Allura breathes out a slow breath on a four count and leans her head against the cool glass of the hover. They can, of course, go via autonomous shuttle—or just transmat straight to the Minister’s residence—but no one within agency is that comfortable with automated transport. They are all, she thinks with wry amusement, a little prone towards control issues.

Lance settles into the driver’s seat in surprising silence. There had been a time when he would have filled the fraught silence with unending chatter, but that time had been very long ago. He steers the hover into the skylane traffic with a steady grace she’d nearly forgotten and she lets her mind wander a bit as they move through the gloom of Altea’s dusk. 

“I was sorry,” Lance says after a time, “to hear about Control, Ms. de’Burgamel.”

///

They set down outside a stately, dignified home in one of the tasteful residential districts of the capitol—posh but not _too_ posh. She sighs before she can think to control the expression of her distaste and Lance chuckles under his breath. Allura shoots him a quelling look before popping open the door to step out. The raked gravel crunches under her heels like the snap of cartilage. 

It’s a distasteful sound and she wishes she hadn’t thought of the metaphor.

Lance catches her elbow with an expression like he’s swallowed a live eel. “She said,” he says lowly. “That Holt called her from a Tor-ed box.”

Allura feels her eyes widen fractionally. 

“Had me confirm Holt’s identity,” Lance continues, graciously giving no sign that he’s noticed her little tell. “And then had me go straight to you. No one at the Castle knows.”

Lance jogs up to ring the door alert for her. She half expects him to bounce on his heels or rock or otherwise give evidence to the nervous energy that she can feel thrum all through him, but he stands at comfortable attention by her elbow. Alert, but not buzzing with it. Allura wonders when the last time she’d seen him had actually been—she can only remember him as he was during the war, far too young to be there and desperate to prove himself because of it. Entering into Altea’s service as a paladin had finally rubbed some of the eager shine off him, she supposes.

Ryner comes to the door with a cigarette dangling from two fingers and a sharp look in her eyes.

“There’s been a development,” she says as if it weren’t abundantly obvious. “You’d best come in.”

Allura nods. The foyer of Ryner’s home is an understated affair done in pale colours—a blushing rose pink running through marble floors, soft green walls, delicate ivory trim—and Allura feels ever so slightly out of place. She lets Lance take her coat, obliquely gratified when he handles it as if it were a set of furs, and watches as he vanishes out of sight.

“This way,” Ryner says and leads her off into a study done up like a university don’s. She opens a crystal decanter and waves it at Allura. “Tippler?”

“Bit late,” Allura replies. “But thank you.”

Ryner shakes the decanter at her with an arched brow. Allura sighs and holds up two fingers. Ryner obligingly splashes a bit of the amber liquid in a glass and hands it to her.

“Lance told you, I assume,” Ryner says as she settles in on one of the low chairs. “That Matthew Holt contacted me?”

Allura makes a soft sound of agreement as Ryner lights another cigarette. Ryner sighs out a long plume of smoke. “He said,” she says in a low, tired voice, “that there’s a mole. Right at the top of the Castle. That he’s been there for years.”

Allura can’t find it in herself to look surprised. She merely tilts her head to the side, a silent request that Ryner get one with things and perhaps without the theatrics. Ryner sighs again but there’s a smile curling around the edges of her lips. 

“It does mean,” Ryner says with that sly little smile. “That you’re rather well placed to look into this matter for the Council now, doesn’t it? Outside the family?”

Allura bites the inside of her cheek lightly but can’t stop the little huff of breath that escapes her. She looks Ryner in the eyes and cocks a brow. “I’m retired, Ryner,” she says. “You fired me.”

She stands to leave and Ryner reaches out and places two fingers on her hand. “The thing is,” she says and her voice is an endless well of exhaustion, “that some time before Alfor … retired”—Allura scoffs at this, loudly, and Ryner waves a cigarette at her—“he came to me with a similar suggestion. And when he died, well, he repeated it.”

Ryner slides a note across to Allura with a key on top of it. Control’s looping chicken-scratch scrawl blares up at her: ‘for Allura, brave little soldier-girl’ it reads. That gets Allura’s undivided attention. Ice runs through her veins. She closes her hand over the key before she can even think about it. 

“He never mentioned his suspicions to you?” Ryner asks gently.

Allura drags her hand back to her lap, key biting lines into her palm, and shakes her head. “No.”

Ryner stubs out a cigarette before lighting another. “Oh,” she sighs. “I just thought he might have mentioned since you were his right hand so to spea—”

“What did you say to him,” Allura interrupts. There’s a fire starting to burn in her, cold giving way to its heat. She draws a finger over Alfor’s near-illegible handwriting. _brave little soldier-girl_ Something terrible starts to claw through her veins.

“Ah,” Ryner makes a little face of displeasure. “I’m afraid I thought that his paranoia had finally caught up to him,” she says. “That he was going to put his entire house down. That bloody mess on Arus-6….”

Allura looks away.

“Dammit, Allura,” Ryner sighs. “This is your generation, your legacy.” She drums her fingers on the desk in a brisk little tap-tap-tap of nerves. “I just thought that if there was any truth to this that you would want to,” she shrugs, “be the one to put it to bed.”

Allura opens her hand and looks down at the key in her hand. It’s an old one, pre-data locks, and it sits heavy. She makes a tight fist around it again, the pain grounding.

“I’ll keep Lance,” she says and Ryner sits back with barely audible breath of relief. “And there’s a retired special branch operative, Coran Smythe, I should like to have him.”

 

 

   
Chapter 2: The Inside Man

Lance hauls himself into work and hopes that he doesn’t look too much like someone’s hit him with a trolley and then decided to back up for good measure. He certainly feels like it—there’s a pleasant ache through his muscles, though he could do without the low-grade pain pulsing at his temples. The weekend had been, just maybe, a little too much fun. 

He has to jog for the elevator down to the Castle’s bowels, but Keith Kogane holds it open with mocking little smile. “Rough morning?” he asks as he eyes Lance’s haggard form.

Lance pulls a face. “That obvious?”

Keith makes a gesture in Lance’s direction that manages to encompass the whole of him. “There’s a bit of lipstick on your collar,” he says shortly. “And your hair is sticking up in the back. Come here,” he tugs Lance around—which is awkward with a hoverbike taking up most of the lift—and straightens up his collar and tie with obsequious care, “there, now you look like less of a hungover prat. Or at least less hungover.”

“Fuck entirely off,” Lance tells him pleasantly. He nods at the bike. “You have a chit for that thing?”

Keith scoffs. “I’m not going to chain it up outside to the gate, now am I? Just asking for some over-eager officer to try and impound it and then I’d be up to my ears in paperwork trying to get it back.” He casts a disdainful eye about the intake pool as they get off the elevator—Lance raises a hand as a few of the girls in transcription catcall him—and shakes his head. “Not that it’s any better with this lot,” he says as the girls titter. “They’ll have your neural lace out of your head and onto the black market before you can blink.”

“Mean, Mr. Kogane,” sings out one of the girls.

“Truthful,” he replies.

Keith eyes him for a long moment until Lance squirms. “So,” he says slowly. “Here to ogle the new girl like a complete twit.”

“Of course not,” Lance sputters, and then thumbs his collar meaningfully. “Besides, I’ve already met her.”

Keith looks at him for a long moment before barking out a harsh little laugh like he’s forgotten entirely how to make the sound. “You are shameless. That at least hasn’t changed.”

///

He fumbles for his wrist transponder when the call comes. He manages to drop the datapad he’d been working on and scatter the little cup full of stolen styluses he’d collected from around the Castle. He hits the audio but not visual button before diving under his desk to scrounge up a working stylus and grunts when he bangs his head against the bottom of the desk. It is manifestly not his day. He’s rather looking forward to going home and doing not much of anything for a while. He hopes the call won’t take long.

“Hello,” he says, trying not sound breathless. “Lance McClain speaking.”

“Hello!” comes the chirpy reply. “This is undersecretary Ryner calling on the behalf of the Council.”

Lance sits up straight very fast. “Ma’am,” he says. “How, ah, how can I be of service?”

“Nothing major,” she soothes. “Just calling round to confirm something. It’s a private chat though, you know,” at this Lance hits the dampening protocols for his office and the Castle’s ICE buzzes to life around him, “ah, good,” she continues without a blip, “I see you understand. I got a call from an anonymous Tor-ed box a few moments ago. Said he’s one of your field ops—Matthew Holt.”

Lance forgets entirely how to breathe for a moment. 

“McClain?”

“Yes,” Lance says. “Sorry. Matthew Holt was one of mine, yes.”

“Ah. ‘Was’?” Ryner asks—Lance swears softly under his breath; the undersecretary graciously doesn’t say anything at all.

“He went dark about a year ago,” Lance says and closes his eyes. “He was part of the Kerberos field team.”

Ryner makes a thoughtful little sound. “That bloody cock-up that was Operation Testify burned him too?” She asks gently. “He’s the only one we’ve had that’s re-established contact, correct?”

Lance blinks. “The only one of mine,” he says after a moment. “Though, um, no offense ma’am, but he hasn’t exactly re-established contact with the Castle. We don’t know where he’s been or what he’s been doing for the past year.”

Something Ryner said tweaks at him and he sits back. “He went dark about two weeks before Operation Testify,” he says carefully, there’s a puzzle taking place inside his head and he doesn’t like the shape of it. “Sent a message saying a sale was a botch and then didn’t come home. Just vanished off the grid.”

“Ah,” Ryner sighs as if suddenly enlightened. “You had best come to the Citadel then. Because our boy has come home, and he says he has treasure.”

The call winks out without fanfare and Lance stares unblinking at the far wall of his little office. He rubs his face with one hand. So much for a short work day.

///

The Unilu who guides Lance through the labyrinth that houses the Voltron Intergalactic Governmental Council glances up at him from beneath her lashes at regular intervals. When he catches her at it she tucks the fringe of her magenta hair behind one pointed ear. He thinks about maybe asking for her name, but then a member of the administrative staff of the Citadel is as likely to have any number of hidden agendas as a member of the Paladins and he has a creeping suspicion his life is about to get entirely too complicated. He gives her a bland smile.

“The undersecretary is waiting for through the far doors, Paladin,” she says in a sweet voice and gestures with her upper arms. He notes how her lower arms pluck at her skirt in overly obvious tell. Lance gives her a little bow and tucks his coat under one arm.

“Thank you,” he says politely and neatly slips around her.

Ryner waits for him with her back to the massive double doors. She stands silhouetted by the last light of the sunset, a softly smoking cigarette in one hand. She’s a tidy, slim figure dressed in the flowing robes of the Olkari. She eyes him idly as he walks up to stare out the windows next to her.

“Treasure,” Lance says by way of introduction and greeting.

She huffs a soft laugh. “You Paladins,” she says. “So hasty.”

Lance waits, stares out the window as the dying sunlight paints the Citadel’s hanging gardens in blues and purples. It’s a very good view. Perks, he imagines, of being one of the most important figures in Council space. Ryner takes another long drag off her cigarette—an odd habit for an Olkari. She smiles wryly when she catches his glance.

“Filthy habit,” she says as she considers the butt before stubbing it out. “Picked it up during the war and then never really got rid of it. Stress,” she sighs, “makes it so much harder to resist the urge.”

This startles a laugh out of him. “I tried to learn how to smoke during the war,” he offers. “Spent two weeks coughing up my lungs and being godawful ill before Colonel Allura de’Burgamel forbid anyone from ever giving me a cig again on the grounds that she was tired of me looking like three-day old carrion all the time.”

He blinks. He had not meant to share that story. Ryner regards him with a sly little smile, her head cocked to the side. There’s something rather unsettling, Lance decides, about an Olkari looking sly—something slightly off-center within the universe. He also realized that she is very, very good at this particular little game. He swallows hard and goes back to watching the floating gardens.

“So you know our pretty Colonel,” Ryner says in that off-hand way that is never as breezy as it seems. Lance shoots her a sideways glance and she tilts her head, like a thoughtful bird.

He sighs. “Everyone in at the Castle knows Ms. De’Burgamel,” he sighs. “She’s one of the originals, from the war. Always with Control.” Ryner hums under her breath, an old war tune, “смулганка,” and Lance quirks a smile. “Yes,” he agrees. “That’s her. The perfect partisan.”

“Matthew Holt, he’s like you, isn’t he,” Ryner asks and Lance blinks at the sudden shift. “Joined the war late, joined it young, and the followed the Paladins into the secret service to fight the new war.”

It’s not a question.

Lance doesn’t bother to answer, just continues to stare at the growing shadows that move across the hanging gardens and watches the undersecretary’s reflection in the window. She takes a long, slow drag of her cigarette. “Holt claims that there’s a mole within the service, deeply embedded,” Ryner lights another cigarette and considers the burning cherry for a moment before pulling in a deep breath. “Refuses to say anything else, insisted I only speak to you to confirm his identity.”

“But you didn’t,” Lance not quite asks, “only speak to me about Holt.”

Ryner quirks a small, sad smile. “Oh, I did.” She waves away his incredulous expression. “I remember you all from the war. Alfor’s vicious children,” she shakes her head. “I’m not sure he quite knew what he was doing gathering the lot of you together and then letting you all lose, but it was desperate times then.”

“You believe him,” Lance realizes all of a sudden like dawn breaking through winter clouds. “You think there’s a mole.”

She pats his arm like a fond dowager aunt. “Do me a favor, McClain, ring around to Ms. de’Burgamel’s place,” she sighs around her cigarette. “It’s time for our perfect partisan to return to the field.”

///

Allura looks both bored and tired when she opens the door. Her hair is a silver spill down her back, framing her face in soft waves and the incongruity of it all throws him into babbling as if he were a mere novice again. She blinks, nods, and closes the door in his face.

That’s honestly a bit of relief. He collects the tattered remains of his dignity about himself and thinks about knocking again. The undersecretary will likely not accept a fit of nerves as an acceptable reason for his failure. Allura opens the door again and eyes him coolly. She’s bundled into an ancient old army coat, a faded gray thing that completely swallows her slender form. She brushes past him with military brusqueness, her heels clicking on concrete like gunshots and he stutters out something entirely inane.  
He loves her ridiculously when she says nothing at all in response.

Lance tries not to fidget with Allura ensconced in the back of his tidy little hover. She stares out the window, her profile clean and cool.

“I was sorry,” he says after a time, “to hear about Control, Ms. de’Burgamel.”

Allura turns to look at him, tired and sad, and nods slowly.

///

He stands on the porch outside the undersecretary’s house as the two women discuss things that frankly send a terrible chill down his spine. A mole. At the top of the Castle. He can believe it, but it breaks his heart.

Lance opens a pack of Djarum Blacks, slim little things in delicate packaging, and considers one. He catches Allura start to rise sharply, her expression icy, before Ryner catches her wrist and she subsides. He pulls out a slender black stick and considers it for a long moment. He lights it when Allura turns her head away from the undersecretary, pain written across every line of her body, he can guess the topic of that particular conversation.

The first drag is as harsh as he remembers it. Burns through his lungs and scrapes down his throat like sand paper. The smell is sweet, like vanilla and incense, and he fights not to cough. Lance turns to stare at the stars as he pulls in the second drag. That goes a bit better and by the time Allura steps out onto the little porch he thinks he’s got the hang of things.

She eyes him for a long moment.

“Didn’t I forbid you from smoking those?” She asks.

“No,” he says and gives her a cheeky smile. “You merely forbid anyone from giving them from me.”  
She sighs and shakes her head, a small smile curling her lips. “You continue to have only the most passing of relationships with the concept of shame,” she tells him, and he gives her a little shrug. She shakes her head again and slips into her shapeless gray coat. “Come along,” she says. “We have a great deal of work to do, and very little time to do it in.”

///

Coran Smythe lives in a tidy two-floor cottage outside the city. They find him, despite the early morning hour, puttering about with hive of buzzing insects that looks as likely to sting the face off anyone who gets close as to be useful. Lance can’t help but shoot Allura an alarmed look, but she wears a fond expression. She presses two fingers to her lips as if to physically suppress the smile before saying very softly, “Coran.”

The man doesn’t startle. He puts down the contraption in his hands and turns around to regard them thoughtfully. He tilts his head to the side as he looks them both up and down. “Princess,” he says, and there’s not a trace of mockery in his voice. “So, it’s true what Alfor thought? There is a mole.”

Allura makes a disgusted sound. “Did he tell you?”

Coran sighs, a great gusty bellow of breath, and shakes his head. “And I imagine he sought to protect you. The noble fool.”

Allura looks away, mouth twisting. “I am recalling you to the service of Altea and the Coun—“

“Yes, yes,” Coran says and waves a hand dismissively. “Done, agreed. Let’s just skip the formalities, shall we?”

Lance fights not to fidget as the two of them regard each other for a long moment, terribly fond, until Coran walks over to Allura and chucks her under the chin. “Brave little soldier girl,” he says.

///

“There’s a little hotel I know,” Coran says as they drive. He’d glowered at Lance until Lance had obligingly pulled out the keys and offered them to the older man. Allura sits behind them, regal as any queen, with her head tilted against the window. She makes a thoughtful noise—neutral but interested and Coran continues: “Mostly students and the like, near Grand Central.”

Lance catches a glance at Allura’s face as they drive on in silence—it’s a study in quiet contemplation. Her eyes meet his in the mirror and he looks away quickly.

“The hotel will do,” she says quietly.

///

Lance glowers at a young girl that jostles her way past Allura as they stand talking to the hotel proprietor—a doughty Unilu with calloused hands and her hair pulled into a high bun that’s slowly falling out of its pins—and gets an impressively bored eyeroll in response. Allura wraps her hand around his wrist and squeezes in warning. The bustle and buzz of the hotel—a jumped up hostel that has delusions of cleanliness—moves around him like an unruly river and it sets his teeth on edge.

“Well,” the proprietor says and then coughs into one of her fists. Her cheeks are a brilliant shade of blue under Coran’s attention. “Well, it’s not standard, but I think there’s a couple of rooms on the top floor that will do.”

Coran smiles winningly and presses a charming kiss to the hand that he holds delicately by the fingertips. The proprietor all but melts into a little puddle of flustered glee. “I’m certain it will be more than enough,” Coran says, and his voice is achingly sincere. “We are in your debt, Mrs. Tye’Osh.”

Allura turns her head to the side, hand over her mouth, and Lance catches the way she bites down on a grin that threatens to ruin her serious demeanor.

After that there is nothing Mrs. Tye’Osh isn’t willing to do. They are shown into a suite of rooms on the top floor that have clearly been shut up for some time. The hotel proprietor bustles about them, one arm dusting, the other two pulling down fresh sheets, and the hand pressed against her cheek in the epitome of scandalized dismay. “Oh dear,” she moans theatrically. “I didn’t realize I’d let it get so dusty.”

“My friend just needs a quiet place to work,” Coran reassures her. “If you might scrounge up a desk, that would be grand.”

Mrs. Tye’Osh pauses and considers Allura who stands with her back to them, gazing down at the hustle and bustle of Altea’s central transportation hub. “Friend,” she says with a curiously flat tone.

Coran turns to look at Allura and his familial fondness is unmistakable. “Honorary niece, really,” he says. “Trying to finish a book.”

At this Mrs. Tye’Osh presses all four of her hands to her chest, her eyes sparkling with glee. “Oh, a writer,” she leans in conspiratorially to Coran who obliges her by angling his head in close. “What does she write?”

Coran shoots Allura a sideway glance. “Mysteries.”

///

He’d expected to be used as Allura’s catspaw when she drafted him into her service (her service, definitely hers, for all the pretty talk of service to Altea) but not her workhorse. Lance is in his shirtsleeves, sweating like a day laborer, wrestling a desk into Allura’s new suite of rooms when she lays a cool hand on his arm.

“Lance,” she says quietly. “Did you get the keys to Control’s flat?”

It’s a question that costs her in emotional resources that Lance can only guess at from the way that she keeps her gaze on her hand on his arm. He swallows hard as he stares down at her bowed head. “I did.”

She gives his arm a little pat. “Fetch our coats. Let’s go for a little walkabout.”

///

He feels a bit like he’s trespassing in a church or walking on an unsettled grave as he steps across the threshold of Alfor de’Altea’s—an affected name that would border on being a bit too smart except for the history of the man—silent flat. Somewhere the faint refrains of a lover’s lament sung by a woman’s husky alto echo up the stairwell. Lance shivers just a bit as if a ghost had run its fingers along his neck.

Allura walks through the flat with her hands in her pockets, her expression flat and inscrutable. She touches nothing, says nothing, and pauses at random places, but makes no move to open any of the boxes that have been piled high towards the ceiling. Lance slips around her to open the curtains sending dust motes twinkling in the late evening light.

She looks ethereal and full of sorrow standing in the middle of Control’s forgotten flat.

There are papers—actual hard copy papers—littering the floor like a second carpet. Lance reaches down and picks one up in baffled curiosity. Control’s cramped handwriting sprawls across the page in esoteric notation. Allura comes around and peers at it over his shoulder. She makes a little sound of interest but doesn’t take it from his hand.

“Operation witchcraft?” He asks in a whisper as if afraid to disturb some reader lurking right around the corner.

Allura snorts a delicate huff of disdain. “Pidge’s little project,” she says coolly. “Went over Control to get it budgeted and approved—right to the minister.”

“Control can’t have liked that,” Lance says after a moment.

“No,” she says with a wry little smile. “He didn’t.”

She wanders away from him, following her own internal guide as she moves about Alfor’s study.  
Lance gently places the paper on the little coffee table that’s full to overflowing with abandoned datapads, crumpled papers, and photographs printed out with little diagrams drawn on them. The entire place is a nightmare in opsec breaches and failures of information control. Boxes obviously dragged out of the Castle’s archives sit on top of Citadel datapads next to files with snippets of various newfeeds shoved inside them. The desk barely has any room to actually work, its so cluttered with the detritus of Control’s thought process.

A collection of little chess pieces catches his eye and he stops to peer at them.

He must have made some little sound, some expression of muted surprise, because Allura looks up from where she studies a cracked datapad, one eyebrow hitched. Lance moves to the side, out of the way of the little tableau Control’d left on his desk. She joins him with a faint frown furrowing her brow.  
Allura picks up the little white bishop with a picture of Keith Kogane taped to it and rolls it between her fingers, eyes distant. Lance bites his lip when he spots the little black queen with Allura’s picture delicately taped to it. She puts the bishop down.

“Box this up,” she says softly. “All of it. And bring it around to the hotel.”

///

He’s sweating like a day laborer again and honestly starting to wonder if he should start billing for heavy lifting by the hour. Allura doesn’t look up as he maneuvers one of Alfor’s corkboards into place behind her desk. Her hair is a brilliant silver in the midday light and she looks lovely, delicate and deadly as she sits neatly, manipulating an old holodisplay of the Castle’s organization chart.

She’s got Control’s little chess pieces set out before her in a place of pride on the desk and she rolls the little white queen between her fingers as she considers the holo.

“Lance,” she calls.

He makes an affirmative grunt, still wrestling with the corkboard. Why she couldn’t have the entire thing converted to digital and set it up as holos, he doesn’t know. But Control liked his little anachronisms and Allura always did follow in his footsteps.

“I need you to do something for me,” she says, and he immediately goes still. “I’d like you to go to the Castle,” she continues without looking at him still rolling the wooden queen piece between her fingers, “on the console of the duty officer’s station are records of staff recently retired. I should like a copy of them,” Lance bites his bottom lip and nods; Allura doesn’t look at him, just continues on in her calm, distracted manner, “and a diagram of the Castle’s reorganization under Katie Holt—Pidge. Along with a list of all payments made from the reptile fund.”

Lance swallows hard.

Allura turns to look at him and gently sets the little queen on the desk. It has the name ‘Honerva’ taped to it. “Can you do that?”

“Yes,” he says. “Of course.”

///

Lance glances through the glass windows of the recreation room, one of the girls from transcription blows him a kiss and he shakes his head at her, as he walks past. He tries to keep his pace calm, unhurried, as he makes his way to the tiny office of the duty officer.

He knows its empty, having set Belinda—a girl after his own heart and delighted to make trouble—after poor Yorak, but his heart hammers like siege engine anyway.

He pops the console open and sets an upload link to one of the general transponders he borrowed off the new girl—sweet thing that really needs to develop some trust issues like the rest of them. He tries not to swear at the little upload bar that pops up, ancient and frankly anachronism that Pidge seems to think is funny to keep on the Castle’s network.

A door slams in the distance, making him jump and jostle the transponder, which gives a distressed little chirp. He swears lowly under his breath when it resets the connection.

Lance is well enough trained that he doesn’t immediately bolt out of the door when the transponder gives a cheerful little ding to announce its completed its task. He hangs about. Makes an ostentatious show of waiting for someone before huffing a great big sigh of frustration. He balls up the transponder and shoves it in his pocket before stomping out.

He runs right into Hunk who steadies him with an amused little smile. “Looking for Yorak?” he asks.  
“Yes,” Lance huffs. “An outgoing file but he’s gone off to play least insight.”

“Worried the new girl has gotten bored of you already?” Hunk teases.

Lance puts a hand to his chest and mimes offense. “Bored?” He squawks. “Of me? Never. No, no. There’s been a paperwork cock up and I want to get ahold of it before Keith sees it. I don’t need more reasons for him to make fun of me.”

Hunk laughs and follows him to the lift. “Where are you off to?”

“Lunch,” Lance says shortly. “I was going to ask the new girl,” he says with expressive air quotes, “but now I shan’t since I’ve been shamed.”

Hunk laughs and slings an arm around his shoulders. “I’ll keep you company then,” he says with a grin. “Since you’ve been shamed and all.”

///

Allura has her feet tucked up underneath herself and a stylus holding up a mess bun that looks like it’ll fall about her ears at any moment. They sit around a scarred-up coffee table with the holodisplay of the Castle’s reorganization under Pidge floating in the air between them. Coran has one arm slung across the back of the couch as he reads his datapad. Lance feels very young and foolish caught between the two of them.

“According to the personal files,” he says, fiddling with his own datapad, “there are seven that were due for retirement anyway,” Allura hums an agreement and doesn’t look up, “then there are few more that are a little more mysterious: Blaytz von Nalquad was dismissed December 4th, Hira de’Alteria retired November 28th,” Lance blinks at looks at Allura, who looks back at him with soft frown. “That’s just two weeks after you and Alfor were forced out.”

Allura sits back and looks at Coran.

“Hira,” he says slowly. “That’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time.”

“She fought with us,” Allura says thoughtfully. “During the war.”

Coran makes a face. “Danced the line between patriot and nationalist,” he says. “A difficult customer, that one.”

“But not a thoughtless one,” Allura replies. She makes a little note on her datapad. “I think it’s time to take a little ride out to the country.”  
   
iii. Remember Them For Me

It’s an odd memory that haunts her. Not one from the war, one of the ones that wake her in the middle of the night with her own screams, but a more recent vintage. Allura rolls the little black queen with her picture tapped to it between her thumb and forefinger as she stares out into the middle distance. Thinks about Control. Remembers.

_‘Allura!’ the shout had rang through the hallways of the Castle. The transcription girls huddled down into their little cubicles like frightened mice. ‘Get in here!’_

_She’d stepped into the little sealed room with its special ICE and reinforced, looping TOR network with one raised eyebrow at the unusual summons. Control was not one for shouting, generally. Keith had caught her eye over the datapad given her a slow blink, the best warning that she’d get that things were about to get … dramatic._

_“Allura,” Alfor’d said, calmer with her present. “Sit down. Take a look at this.”_

_She’d taken the datapad from him without much fanfare. It’d been a slight little thing in her hand and she’d been struck by frailty of it. They’d never used such flimsy things, during the war, far too likely that it would shatter during bombing or some equally inopportune time._

_The war had had a way of rending everything down to its most brutal structures._

_It’d felt like no one had even dared breath in that little room as she’d peered at the datapad, scrolling through fleet movements, shipping manifests, a complete logistical picture of the Galra empire’s southeastern fleet exercises. It wasn’t exactly a goldmine, but it had the sheen of one. Glitter. And precisely what the Council had been hounded after them about for months._

_Allura’d set down the datapad gently, even now afraid the damned thing would shatter if she looked at it wrong. “All of this,” she’d said slowly, trying to figure out the puzzle Control was putting in front of her—sometimes she’d rather wish he’d stop trying to live up to that nickname, “it’s exactly what the damned politicians have been after us about. Where did you get it?”_

_Pidge’d given a little cough, her expression warring between smug and worried. Alfor’d glowered at her like a thundercloud about to break, but she didn’t pay him any mind. Her attention had been entirely upon Allura. “It’s a new source I’ve developed,” she’d said with touch of pride. Alfor’d scoffed, loudly, at that. “Kept off the regular books.”_

_“Top secret!” Alfor’d added. There’d been a manic gleam in his eyes that worried Allura, just a little. “She’s gone straight to the minister! Her little cabal have been given permission to run it dark from the rest of us.”_

_“Look, Alfor,” Lotor had started, his tone conciliatory._

_“Shut up,” Alfor’d snapped making them all blink in shock._

_“The style is chopped, brutal and appalling,” had been Keith’s only comments into that stunned silence as if he’d not noticed the tension one wit. “Information is a complete fabrication from start to finish.” He’d put down his tablet with as much delicacy as Allura’d put down hers—then again, both of them had learned to distrust delicate things during the war. “It might actually be the real thing.”_

_He’d looked her right in the eye and arched one dark brow. It was a look that said they’d have to be the adults in the room, with the tempers surging like the seas during a storm._

_“If,” she’d said heavily, “it’s genuine then it’s gold dust,” she hadn’t missed the way smug looks flew between Pidge, Hunk and Lotor. “But,” she’d added, to rein them back in. “It’s topicality is … suspicious.”_

_She’d almost missed Keith’s little sigh. When she’d shot him a look he’d given her the tiniest of eyerolls. After the way Operation Testify had been blown, none of them had reason to trust anything that looked too good—and Keith’d always been the most stingy with his trust._

_“Allura is suspicious, Pidge!” Alfor’d crooned in a tone so unlike him that_

_It’d been a surprise that the table hadn’t cracked from the way Pidge’s knuckles had gone white where she’d gripped its edge. “The Council agrees that there’s been too many leaks,” she’d hissed, her eyes bright with a wet sheen—no one had been able to look at her straight. They all missed Matthew. “Too many blown secrets around here._


	2. Like A Knife in the Woods (you cut out the good in me)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Otherwise known as 'fae fucking bullshit'. I accept now that I am never gonna finish this thing. It was to be a retelling of [ A GUIDE FOR YOUNG LADIES ENTERING THE SERVICE OF THE FAIRIES, by Rosamund Hodge](https://hanginggardenstories.tumblr.com/post/141841090918/a-guide-for-young-ladies-entering-the-service-of) which is a poem I love. But, alas, the muse no longer loves this story.

Like A Knife In The Woods (you hunt down the good in me)

i. No One Has Ever Loved This Way Before

Hunk stares at his hands, well aware that he is playing out every bad trope in a young adult novel, and wonders faintly if he’s lost his mind. He clenches his hands into fists, blunt nails digging into heavy calluses. He’s not the type to mount a daring rescue. He’s not impetuous and brave. He’s not clever and ruthless. He’s not charming enough talk the birds from the trees with a quick-silver wit to match.

He’s trembling with terror, unsure and untested, but he can’t turn back. He can hear the whispering behind him—a susurration of sound moving through students who pretend not to see him.

“Isn’t he roommates with…?” Hunk shuts his eyes, pain a wild thing chewing on his heart.

“He’s going to go…?” Clenches his jaw so hard he swears he can feel his molars crack.

“Poor, dumb sonuvabitch.” And Hunk can’t even argue with that one. 

Iron sits heavy in his pockets, shavings from his mechanic shop, a ring of rowan ash on a silver chain around his neck, and offerings of cream and sugar in his backpack for the lesser fae. He’s got salt and holy water in equal measure. Hunk’s studied every bargain ever recorded, every deal struck, and he knows the words forward and back. He’s as prepared as he can be.

He’s doing all the things the upperclassmen told them to never, ever to do. You wear your iron, keep your salt close, and if you see something from the corners of your eyes—if something shimmers not quite right on the edges of your vision—you pretend you don’t see. Better that the Fair Folk take just your eyes in offense than all of you.

It’s one of those things that no one ever admits aloud, but everyone knows: the Garrison’s built on a sithen. One of the few that are left, perhaps the only one that’s left in a world slowly taken over by iron and steel, a gateway into a world ruled by beings ancient and alien. Everyone knows that the sithen is there even if their instructors refuse to speak of it, going pale and silent—eyes darting to the edges of the room where the shadow grow thick and roiling. Everyone knows the name of someone who’d disappeared one day, never to come back. 

There’s always a few every year, they’re told by the upperclassmen, that are Taken—the word fraught and capitalized in even in the most hushed of whispers. The ones that don’t follow the rules—use their own names, or don’t carry their salt, or refuse to give an offering when one is due. The ones that burn too bright, laugh too loud, carry a light within them that draws everyone—even the Fairest of the Fair—to them. The desperate ones with a wish that can only be answered in the deep dark. 

You’re supposed to forget them, Hunk knows, and pretend you never knew their name, knew their laugh, knew the lightning flash of their smile against dark skin. Hunk had thought it a tragedy like all natural disasters—terrible things happen in the world, but you don’t throw yourself into the sea when the storm takes boat. You mourn and you let it go. You move on.

At least that’s what he’d thought until it was Lance. 

Then the tragedy of the Taken became his tragedy. His shattered heart and endless longing. Because he can’t move on past Lance. Never ever. That’s the fixed point of his life and he’d rather see the world burned to ashes than move past it.

So now he’s the one standing at the edges of the forest with his backpack, iron, and desperate wish that can only be answered by those in the densest part of the shadows. 

Because it’s Lance and he can’t pretend he doesn’t know Lance’s name. Doesn’t know the sound of his laugh too loud and clearer than any bell. Can’t pretend he doesn’t know the feeling of Lance’s warmth curled around him. Can’t forget the feeling of soft skin and softer words. So he stands at the edge of forest and tries to hold together fragmented edges of his courage to force himself to take that step, and then the next, and the next, and so on until he’s deep in the woods. So deep the lights of Garrison are only the faintest of memories. No man-made light has ever illuminated these woods, splashed vulgar and crass across these trees.

He gathers the tattered remnants of his bravery and forces himself past seething shadows and sounds that making him hunch his shoulders, hands shaking like a junkie’s with a needle and spoon. 

Hunk marches himself past the silvered pools and sweet songs sung by things with more teeth than hair.

He stumbles through groves of weeping willows whose branches snag his shirt, his hair, leaving him with long stinging scratches that ooze sluggish blood.

Hunk bursts, finally, staggering and sweating, into a corpse of pines layered with heavy snow even though the high heat of summer presses with an oppressive hand across every other part of the forest. The chill of the snow is a shock to his system as he lands on his knees, stunned as much by the season change as anything else. 

He kneels in the snow—chest heaving, arms bleeding—and stares at a woman who regards him with faintly disinterested curiosity. Hunk cannot tell if she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen or the ugliest. 

Her brows are high and arching. Her cheeks sharp enough to cut glass. Her hair a single sheet of white, paler even than the snow around her, falling past her knees heavy and straight. Her lips are a thin displeased line without the barest hint of colour and her eyes glow a flat yellow that reminds Hunk of school buses and fake flowers in cheap funerals. 

She stands slowly, her dress falling about her in heavy, slithering folds. Her movements are slow, achingly graceful, and fill him with a nameless dread. He can’t move as she makes her plodding way towards him, the hem of her dress dragging across the ground in slow sweeps, erasing her footprints from the snow. He stays kneeling, knees slowly freezing, as she raises one long-fingered, ice-pale hand to cup his chin, trace the line of his cheekbone.

“And who are you, noble heart, to come unasked for, unlooked for, into my private sanctuary?” She asks, her voice a sibilant hiss that slinks down his spine and pulls at something dark and feral in the back of his mind. Something that tells him that he should run, run, run.

But he’s caught between her slender fingers, cold as death, and can only stare up into her inhuman eyes. His throat works around a scream, a shout of terror, but nothing comes. Her thumb idly traces his cheekbone, the nail passing perilously close to the edge of his eye—back and forth, back and forth. Eventually his self-preservation instinct kicks in, it never wise to be impolite to the Fair Folk. “Hunk, my name is Hunk,” he swallows hard and then adds, impulse born of terror. “My lady.”

Her lips curl in a slow smile. Hunk’s stomach coils in response. “Such a polite poppet. Why do you come to me, come to this place so far from your mortal lands?”

Her other hand comes to cup his face, her palms cradling his jaw in a parody of gentleness. Both her thumbs running the high line of his cheeks—back and forth, back and forth. His heart is wild with terror. “I’m looking for my friend,” he whispers as if telling a terrible secret. “m-my best friend.”

“Ah. Have you come to mount a rescue, noble heart?” Her question is as soft as new snow and twice as cold. 

“Please,” he whispers, he begs. “His name is Lance. Have you,” he swallows hard around the ball of shrieking fear climbing up his throat, “have you seen him?”

Her head cocks to the side, hair spilling down one shoulder in a rippling wave silver. It’s smooth as silk where it brushes his hands, clenched hard at his sides. “Are you mine, then, to make such demands of me,” she muses, all the while her thumbs trace lines across his face. “I could do with you, noble heart, I truly could.”

He trembles where he kneels before her, caught between the steel of her hands, the magic in her eyes. “Please,” he whispers, not even sure what he’s asking for. 

Her body curls around his reminding him of nothing so much as great snake ready to strike. “Please what, noble heart?”

“My friend, Lance, my, m-my best friend,” Hunk stutters out. “Have you seen him?”

“Your ‘best friend?” She echoes, tone both amused and dismissive. “Such weak words for so great a love.”

Hunk’s lungs seize at her words, breath stuttering in his throat. 

She laughs then, the sound surprisingly high and carrying. The sound upsettingly young and girlish in her corpse-pale throat. “Did you think it a secret?” She asks, the laugh still trickling through her voice. “Did you think it a hidden piece of your heart?”

She curls even tighter to him, her hair falling in dense lines around them, forming a curtain of white that blocks out everything but her sly smile and glowing eyes. “Did you think that your every emotion, every feeling for this boy, was not stamped across your face like a brand for anyone that cared to look?”

His throat works against her hands and he cannot look away from her yellow eyes. Hunk wonders, briefly, if this is the way that small rodents feel trapped in front of a snake. “I, I…” His throat spasms around the words. “I don’t know.”

Her smile is a jagged thing in the night—sharp and feral. “Then allow me the grace of enlightenment for you: your love for this boy is etched in every piece of you.”

“Please,” he whispers, he gasps, he sighs, against her frigid hands. “If you’ve seen him.”

She releases him so suddenly he wonders if the sincerity in his words had burned her. Her skirts smear across the snow behind her, every line of her body painted in peeved annoyance. “And if I have, noble heart?” She asks and her tone is snide, surprisingly petty like a toddler denied a toy. “If I have seen this great love of your life, what should I do?”

Hunk slams his eyes shut against the sudden wellspring of tears. He doesn’t know what he expected in the deep woods. What he thought would happen should he happen to find one of the Fair Folk, one of the great Lords and Ladies of the Deep Woods. But he’s here now and he’s come too far now to go back empty handed. “If you have, please just tell me.”

The sigh she heaves seems to come from the molten core of the earth. She slides into a seat on a snow-covered rock as if she didn’t feel even a moment of aching chill—as if the cold could never touch her. Cupping her narrow chin in one hand, elbow against her sharp knees, she regards him for a moment that stretches and pulls against him. “And what would you do, should I tell you I saw this great love of your life?”

The gasp that yanks itself out of his throat drags with it any rational thought he might have. “I’d save him! Bring him home! Please, just please, if you’ve seen him.”

She regards the nails of one hand before studying him from under thick, midnight eyelashes. The glow of her eyes nearly a tangible caress across his skin. He shudders at the thought. “I can hardly be asked to remember every little mortal life that walks within our halls.” She tells him, dismissive and thoughtless cruel. “And what would I gain, even if I did tell you?”

Hunk racks his brain for something, anything, that might entice one of the Fair Folk—and he knows without question that he kneels before one of the Ladies of the Court, her demeanor and thoughtless power could mean nothing else—to enter into a bargain. “I, um, I can make you things?” He offers. At her skeptically arched brow he barrels forward, feeling more confident in this, the height of his skills. “I can build you anything you need. I can craft you anything you want.”

“Are you an artificer then?” She asks, interest in her tone unwilling but present. Her gaze goes vague for a moment. “We could use a master craftsman, since the dwarves are no longer willing to trade.” Her gaze sharpens and rakes his kneeling form. “Are you a master craftsman, noble heart?”

It’s all he can do to nod, jerky and painful.

Her laughter is a terrifying thing of silver and joy. “Well then, noble heart, let us make a deal.” 

Hunk swallows hard against the heartbeat that’s lodged itself in his throat, frantic and skittering. All the contracts he’s studied, all the records of deals struck that he’s read, every single one of them fly clean out of his mind like doves freed from a cage. The smile that curls across her lips, a sly Cheshire grin, tells him more than anything else that he’s in the process of making an epic mistake—abort, abort, abort, danger Will Robinson. But he can’t, because it’s Lance and he never could leave well enough alone when it comes to Lance.

“You know my wish,” he tells her, willing his voice to be steady even as his soul recoils from what he's about to do. His courage is on its last fumes, but he holds onto them like a drowning man holding onto a log. "I want to find and rescue Lance, free and clear of any fae interference."

She runs a finger over her lips--back and forth, back and forth--as she contemplates him where he kneels in the snow. She cocks her head slowly to the side, as if it were suddenly too much to fight gravity's hold, her milky-white hair--the colour of dead fish eyes and fresh snow--slides around her like a cape. "A mighty wish indeed," she murmurs. "What a great love you hold for this boy."

Hunk wills himself not to say anything further. He's put what he wants on the metaphorical table for her inspection, though he's getting the sick feeling that she already knew it, that she'd known from the second he'd stepped foot in her forest. And it is her forest, of that he no longer has any doubt. She sits on a snow-covered bit of stone as if it were a throne, as if it were carved from ivory and alabaster. His knees ache, muscles cramping and protesting, the snow melting and re-freezing into his pants until he's certain they are as much ice as cloth. 

She sighs at his silence, her glowing gaze sliding from his to contemplate something in the forest. "I will make you this offer, noble heart, be the artificer for my chess pieces. Make their knives and scythes. Make their midnight armour. And in return I will give you the full run and reign of my court to search for your lost love and to lead him home should he wish to return."

Hunk searches the words for a hidden trick, for the little piece of word-play that will leave him trapped and stuttering, but he doesn't see it. Can't think past his heart's sudden surge of hope, because he know--he knows--that this woman, both the loveliest and most revolting he's ever seen, knows where Lance is. That hope curls inside his chest, twisting under his ribs like a living thing. But he has to be sure.

"If I make the weapons and armour for your ... chess pieces," he can't help the question that winds itself into his words, "I'll have freedom to move through your court. You won't, uh," he wracks his brain for the correct words--he knows these words, he does. "You will not bar my path by your hand or another's raised for you, you will not block my search by word, nor deed, nor unvoiced wish."

Her eyes gleam in the settling gloom like a cat's, bright and predatory. "Yes," she agrees, sighs with audible delight. "To this I give you my word."

Hunk swallows hard. It seems too easy, this agreement, and he's suddenly aware that nothing comes without a hidden poison in this midnight realm. But he's caught now, no way to back out. "I agree," he whispers. Her eyes seem to flare in creeping shadows. "I swear it."

She slides to her feet in a move that makes him think of switchblades and flick-knives--all one movement, explosive and fluid. She extends those ice-and-ivory pale hands to him and Hunk places his in them, feeling her fingers curl around his like a vice--a trap of frozen flesh and bone. She pulls him to his feet as if he weighed less than piece of thistledown.

"Can I," his voice catches, stutters. "Can I ask your name?"

Her knife-slice smile is brilliant in the darkness. "You may call your mistress Haggar, this I will allow."

***

Hunk stumbles after her as she glides through the shadows of the forest, perfectly at home within their roiling darkness. He tries not to see how the gloom gathers around her, scrabbling after her skirts, clutching at her arms with tiny tendril, like a pet begging for its mistress’s attention. His knees burn and ache, protesting the sudden movement after being locked into kneeling submission for gods only know how long while he bargained with the mistress of this wood. He clenches his jaw at the slicing pain and follows along in her slithering wake, as if he coasted in her slipstream. 

Haggar catches him when he almost falls, knees finally giving out underneath him, her fingers icy and gentle as they wrap around his elbows. Her smile is a wicked, curling thing in the gathering darkness. He desperately wants to cry. Maybe wants to throw up as her corpse-pale face tilts towards his in a parody of a lover's concern. but all he can do stagger after her as if pulled by an unseen leash. Her breath huffs across his skin in a something that's a near-cousin to a laugh and he shudders at the sickly-sweet scent of it. Like cloves and rotting flowers.

If his new mistress notices his unease, his roiling discomfort at her touch, she ignores it completely. He wonders, a little wildly in his feverish terror, if she would even recognize mortal unease; wonders if she has ever seen anything other than different echelons of shrieking terror. Her hand at his elbow is steady, gentle, and her thumb rubs across his barred skin in a mockery of comfort. Hunk knows better than to believe that she could even possibly entertain the faintest notion of concern. His long study in the Garrison archives has disabused him of any such illusions, as comforting as they might have been. 

The forest shifts and seethes around them. Haggar tugs him past valleys filled with strange luminescent flowers, groves of sweet smelling trees whose branches shift and stretch towards him as they glide past, pools filled with shimmering liquid that failed to obey any rule of physics he knew applied to water. He trembles and shivers in her grasp and she croons to him, soft and sickly sweet like rotting roses, but never gives a moment to rest, a second to gather himself as they keep their soldier's march through the forest.

"Close, my artificer, my noble heart, we are close to our home," she breathes in his ear, and he swallows hard against the nausea that threatens to overtake him. He's certain that throwing up on his new mistress's skirts would not earn him any favors. 

He's not certain what he was expecting of Haggar's domain, but the unassuming swell of grass and half over-grown rock was not it. He can half make out the form of ziggurat in the rising mound. Assuming a ziggurat had been built, half buried, and then forgotten for centuries. He hysterically remembers reading of Aztalan, an under-studied archaeological site in the middle of North America, with its mounds and decaying stone steps. He wonders, then, if those half-remembered structures had been fae constructions as well.

Haggar reaches out one skeletal hand towards the overgrown mound with its mass of curling blackberry bushes and sweet-smelling flowers and makes the smallest of flicking gestures. At her tiny movement the mound shudders like a great dying beast, and Hunk shivers at the sound of grinding rocks and shrieking metal-against-metal. Had it not been for her hand at his elbow, frozen fingers curling around the joint like a vice, he would have run shrieking from that place. 

But he can't, and thus he stands shivering and terrified, before the ever-expanding hole into a darkness he desperately wants no part of.

There's no light, no welcoming sound, not even a whiff of a scent that escapes from the great void that opens within the earthen mound. But Haggar smiles and sighs as if greeted by a lover, every part of her relaxing in contentment and that alone is enough to make Hunk shiver all over like a spooked horse. 

Her hand slides from his elbow down his forearm to his wrist, wrapping around it like a delicate shackle of steel. She’s barely his height and he’s nearly twice her in width, but she pulls him down into that cavernous hole as if he were nothing more than a recalcitrant toddler. Hunk cranes his head back, throat arching, as she tugs him into the darkness—as if the shadows were frigid water and he was trying to keep his mouth clear of its suffocating embrace. 

Haggar’s grip has no mercy in it and he is dragged down, down, down into the shadows—their inky embrace sweeping over his head like high tide across the shore. 

Six slipping, stumbling steps down after Haggar and Hunk finally drags a gasping breath into his lungs. His shoulders heave like a drowning man's; his body refusing to believe that anything breathable exists under the depths of the shadows. He shivers and trembles, wrist tugging against Haggar's grip. He thinks wildly that the darkness surges against him, presses across his mouth, slides down his throat, and chokes him like the rush of salt water against a capsized sailor. 

But his lungs eventually find air, equilibrium, and his entire body shudders like a racehorse after the final sprint. Hunk swallows hard as he stands on what seems to be the first of million landings as the stairs descend into depths that seem as vast and impenetrable as the Mariana Trench. Haggar's hands sweep up his arms to cup his cheeks and she croons to him in a language that he is certain has never been heard under the mortal sun. He shakes within her hold as if he would shake himself apart--bones tearing from flesh, sinews snapping, tendons ripping apart. But he slowly stills--the great tremors across his body slowing as he slowly grows accustomed the oppressive gloom. 

Hunk lets himself fixate on Haggar's glowing gaze--wondering with idle and slightly delirious curiosity what type of genetic quirk resulted in their luminescence. He watches with distant bemusement as her expression shifts from annoyance, to curiosity, to something that might be the kissing cousin to concern. He knows, he knows, not to ascribe anything like human emotion to ice-and-alabaster creature that holds his trembling form as easily as cat might pin a mouse. But he cannot help but wonder if maybe she feels something like apprehension, something approximating concern, as she studies his face. 

Human nature, Hunk thinks a little hysterically, is a funny thing--always finding similarity to itself in places where it simply is not possible. The human capacity towards anthropomorphism is a fascinating and impressively pathetic thing. 

Haggar holds him as his great gulping breaths slow to something steadier, more even, more controlled. Her thumbs sweep across his cheekbones and her breath brushes across his lips as they stand locked together on that first landing. When he finally stands still and steadied, feeling dizzy and overwhelmed, Haggar's hands sweep back down to his wrists and she tugs him gently--so impossibly gently--down, down down. He follows after her, helpless and despairing.

Down that long, winding descent Haggar's brilliant gaze never leaves his and Hunk slips, slides, staggers along after her--snared by those glowing eyes.

Once upon a time, in another life, he and Lance had watched a documentary on venomous snakes. He remembers vividly--can almost still feel Lance's long, slender body pressed against him--Lance's bemused commentary, his wondering disbelief at why the mouse didn't just fucking run when confronted with the rattlesnake's swaying form. Hunk understands, now, why running was never an option for the poor mouse. 

When they reach, finally and at long last, the last landing Haggar releases him and swings her arms out wide--her smile broad and delighted, horrifying in its girlish innocence. "Welcome home, noble heart."

At her words a thousand, thousand, thousand lights erupt into existence in echoing darkness. Stars exploding into life at the first word uttered. 

Hunk shields his eyes with an upflung arm, flinching away from the sudden light, and she laughs that high, girlish laugh again, taking delight in his cringing form. He drops his arm then, knowing the gesture to be useless, and blinks helpless at the flaring light. He’s not sure what he expects with the sudden reveal, but another endless forest was not it. The ground covered in snow and moss, trees arching into the high darkness of what he imagined was the cave ceiling, and tiny, flickering orbs of light twinkling like the stars from a children’s song hung among their bowed branches.

He knows he looks like a fool with his mouth hanging open and wonder-struck but he can’t help it. He hadn’t expected this place to be pretty, to be a piece of tranquil stillness. 

She laughs again and catches the edge of his sleeve, tugging him along after her. And he follows, nearly tripping over his own feet because he can’t force himself to look away from forest—silver and green, and caught in a sudden sweep of winter. The leaves are a rich, summer green but everywhere hangs heavy snow and frost creeps along after them. 

Haggar hums a song he’s certain no mortal ears has ever heard as she drags him along, pleasure and contentment draped heavy in her form. It’s a parody of a lover’s walk. Hunk’s been tugged along like this after Lance, with Lance laughing and pleased just to be in his company. But Haggar has never felt a simple pleasure, of this Hunk is certain, and her happy croon makes his stomach clench and roil. 

The emerald and silver forest morphs into silver and emerald halls, their steps along the gleaming floor loud and ringing, and Hunk wants nothing more than to curl into himself and hide. Shoulders hunching, gaze fixed on sweep and slither of Haggar’s skirts, Hunk fights to remember how to breath as fear snakes icy tendrils across his lungs and squeezes. He can feel a hundred eyes track his progress through the halls. Hears the whispers swell and break after them in a great susurration. Catches from the corners of his eyes ice-and-shadow forms slink along the edges of the hall, careful to stay out of Haggar’s path.

And if the lady of the court notices a thing she gives no sign of it. Haggar sweeps along the halls as if she owns every piece of them straight down to the smallest molecule of dust and all know it. And Hunk, oh Hunk, can only drift along in her wake like a dingy tethered to a great ship, small and powerless. 

She hums as she strides through the halls—long, winding corridors as vast and labyrinthian as any prison built to hold a monster; though Hunk knows no golden thread will lead him back home—and swings her hand where it remains clutched around his wrist. Out of panicked helplessness, Hunk studies her long-fingered hand where it shackles him. He can barely stand look at it and all that thoughtless grip means, but it’s better than contemplating the vastness of the court, the impossibly numbered forms that he half sees slinking around the edges of the halls, and the almost certain futility of his task. 

Better then to lose himself a little in considering his new mistress’s (and there is a thought that makes every part of him tremble and despair) ice-and-ivory skin and its illusion of delicacy. He lets himself forget the passage of time and distance in memorizing the press of her rings, the heavy bands of silver that race up her arm, her long, void-black nails. Hunk remembers, half stunned with the memory, Lance complaining about how damned hard it was to find truly black nail polish. And now here he was towed along like drowning swimmer in rip tide by a hand dipped in midnight.

If he was cleverer, Hunk knows, he would have memorized the number of their steps so he could steal back to the hidden entrance of sithen.

If he was braver, Hunk knows, he would have met the seething gazes he can feel press against his skin with a bright and defiant gaze.

If he was charming, Hunk knows, he would have looked about himself with a flashing smile and easy grace to seduce all tracked his passage.

If he was calmer, Hunk knows, he would have studied the hidden hierarchies of the sudden mass of beings and how each belonged or did not belong in that glittering throng.

But he is none of these things. He is anxious, wildly terrified, and two heartbeats from collapsing into desperate tears. 

So he studies this hand about his wrist as if it has never been anywhere else. He studies the slender digits, tipped with black talons that he imagines could slice through the vein at the base of his hand without a second’s resistance. He studies the multitude of rings that adore each finger—precious stone and metal wrought in pleasing forms. He studies fish-belly white skin and notes how not a single imperfection mars it.

Hunk lets his mind catalogue every part of Haggar’s hand rather than try to contemplate the flood of sensations that threaten overwhelm him and leave him drowning in their details. 

He nearly runs her over when she comes to stop before an unassuming set of doors. His cataloguing mind easily switches from her graceful hands to this new portal—all the details of doors (wood the type of dark mahogany only seen in libraries and forgotten government offices, black banded metal and heavy double locks—locking from the outside only) suddenly screaming for his attention. 

The doors boom open at the imperious flick of Haggar’s fingers, a gesture as thoughtless as her grasp on his wrist.

She swings him through the doors with one graceful step as if sweeping him into a dance that only she knows the steps of. She releases him as he stumbles into the room, sliding her hands up his arms to his shoulders to give him a little shove—playful and harsh—to prod him deeper into its depths. 

“Your workshop, noble heart!” Haggar proclaims as if giving him something impossibly precious. She preens and favors him with a smug, calculating smile. “Any tool, or implement, or workman’s toy you could wish will be provided here. If your heart can think of a need, it will be met.”

Hunk nods jerky and dazed—too overwhelmed by their surreal journey into a realm he can scarce comprehend and half convinced he’ll wake at any moment to find Lance drooling a little against his shoulder, some terrible b-rate movie droning on in the background.

“Go, my artificer, my noble heart, and explore your new domain,” Haggar tells him, commands with happy gentleness. 

Hunk swallows hard, but moves with alacrity to comply. He knows within the marrow of his bones that to displease her now, in this moment when she feels benevolent and smug, would be his ruin. She hovers behind him, near vibrating with predatory curiosity, as he makes his slow and hesitating way through room.

A room resolves itself to be a series of rooms—a great sprawling workshop of every craft his heart could possibly wish to explore. A massive forge occupies one room, it’s bellows and hearth rising into up into the darkness that serves as a ceiling. He wonders vaguely about smoke and carbon monoxide poisoning. He asks her about this—worrying slightly about asphyxiating long before he can ever find Lance—and receives as disinterested shrug in return.

“If ventilation is a thing that you require,” she says as if this is the simplest thing in the world and he a very simple child for not realizing it, “then this space will provide it.”

With that distressingly vague answer in hand, Hunk wanders further through this new space and tries to not feel as if he was exploring the edges of a cage, a prison, even if built with every wish he could ever have (every wish but one) in mind. He wonders, then, if this is how Hephaestus felt when Zeus first set him before his forges—at once eager and despairing. 

It is not until he reaches the jeweler’s tables that he understands, precisely and completely, what Haggar means when she says that these rooms, this new realm of his, will provide him what he wishes.

The jeweler’s tables are a thing of wonder. Delicate strands of silver hang in great looping strands from a wall. Bins of every precious stone he could ever wish to work with spill from the walls, filling his hands with rubies, sapphires, and diamonds as if they were nothing more than drops of rain water. (And oh how Haggar laughs and laughs and laughs at his wondering expression. “Mortals,” she sighs as her hilarity dies off. “So fascinated by bits of glittery stone.”) But somehow, he could not find even the most basic casting oven.

As he turns to ask Haggar where it might be found, something in the darkness festers and bulges in the corner of his vision. Hunk swallows hard against the sudden surge of nausea and forces himself to turn to face the seething mass as it slowly grows and swells until it towers above him. It takes all remains of his fragmented courage to stand in front of the great wellspring of shadows that surges and bursts from the floor like a boil being lanced.

When it finally settles, the darkness receding back into the corners of the room where it lurks like a loyal hound, Hunk stares dumb-founded at the massive doors of what looks like the biggest lost wax kiln he’s ever seen. Useless filigree curls around its hulking form, an unsubtle attempt to make the beast of a machine as beautiful and fine-boned as everything else in this realm. It makes Hunk fall just a little in love with the kiln—a warhorse dressed in pony barding, too plodding and clumsy to be beautiful but someone has tried. 

He runs his fingers over the doors, the little display with its unsettling and unsettled lettering that looks like no script he’s ever seen, the wires and the double locks. Humans, he thinks to himself amused and inexplicably sad, and their tendency towards anthropism. The surge of protective fellow-feeling that swells within his breast for this unfeeling bit of steel and coppering wiring is as useless as the fine sweep of silver that attempts to pretty it. 

“Thank you,” he says—to Haggar, to the waiting darkness. Haggar laughs, dismissive and amused, but Hunk swears the darkness curls in upon itself and the silence takes on a pleased tinge. Politeness, he remembers, never goes amiss amongst the fae. “It’s exactly what I was looking for.”

Haggar settles herself—looking like nothing so much as a very self-satisfied raven in her billowing robes that hang from her sharp and slender form—upon one of the tables, apparently content to watch him continue to make his way through the workshop from awkward vantage point.

The jewelry stamp that bubbles into existence delights him as much as the lost wax kiln. He’s not even surprised when what he had assumed to be a solid black wall, roils and explodes inward to reveal an entirely new section of the (his?) workshop. Glass-working tools springing from walls on silvered hooks. A massive kiln spiraling from the floor into the vaulted shadows of the ceiling. A pair of annealing ovens bigger than any he’d ever seen erupting from complete nothingness.

Hunk swears he feels the silence press against him eager anticipation—like a dog waiting to be told its done its job well. He laughs then, feeling for the first time like he’d found stable ground. He knows what to do amongst machines and tools and the great lurking beasts of creation. He thanks each table, every tool, every kiln, forge, and oven that wills itself into being for his use and pleasure. He runs callused fingers over their surfaces and smiles to imagine that they tremble in happy pleasure. 

“Do you like your new realm, noble heart?” Haggar calls from the jeweler’s room, long since forgotten in his meandering exploration. It takes him several long moments to find his way back to her—his workshop having apparently tripled in size as he realizes new and interesting projects he could work on given all the resources the fae could provide. 

“I do,” he says shyly. “It is a thing of wonder.”

She claps her hands together in a mockery of girlish pleasure. “Excellent. These halls are your domain, within them you are lord here.”

Her words turns the blood in his heart to ice and with every beat of his trembling heart his veins run cold. No gift given among the fae comes from nothing. “My lady?”

Haggar’s smile is a jagged slash across her fine-featured face. “Good for you to remember who you belong to,” she croons, hands coming up to cup his face, thumbs tracing his cheekbones, coming worryingly close to his eyes. She contemplates him with a narrow, sharp-focused gaze that eats away every piece of his newly won calm. “I wonder, then, should I gift you something to ensure that all know to whom you belong?”

Hunk shudders in her hands—caught fast and trembling. “If it pleases my lady,” he whispers, so low he almost can’t hear himself. His mind recoils from any idea of what she might give him to declare her ownership. Collars, he thinks, are traditional. 

She hums low in her throat, a predator’s happy trill. Haggar slides from her perch in a slither that suggests graceful tendons in places that no human could ever have. Her skirts pool about her, heavy and decadent, as she turns slow to consider the vast array of the jeweler’s workshop. “Something of silver, perhaps, to give you Sight.”

Hunk twists his fingers hard in his sleeves to keep from giving voice to the protest that surges in his chest. 

He closes his eyes as she moves from instrument to instrument, tool to tool, her fingers moving over them as his had only seconds ago. His mind helpfully lists the way each could cause terrible injury in willing hands. His lips aches where he bites it and he wonders briefly if he’s managed to bite through it.

“Come here, my noble heart,” Haggar commands with arrogant confidence. He swallows hard when he realizes that she stands before the jeweler’s press, a box in her pale hands. He’s positive he didn’t see that box when he made his way through the workshop. 

He goes to her and tries to hide his trembling hands in his sleeves. She catches one hand with both of hers and he realizes vaguely that the box remains floating where she had been holding it—hovering in the air as if it had simply forgotten to fall. His breathing picks up and he can hear the edge of hysteria, the start of hysterics, shivering through it.

Seven silver impression die spring out of the box to dance in a lazy circle above their heads. Hunk doesn’t dare look away from her glowing eyes to track them. The slow movement of the impression die, Haggar’s thoughtless use of magic to call them into movement at her whim, forces him to realize yet again how very far from home he has stumbled. The laws of physics have no place in these emerald and shadow halls. 

“Pick one, artificer,” Haggar softly demands. “Select your seal.”

At that he cannot help but drag his gaze up to where the impression die circle and spin in patient idleness. He almost wants to just grab the first one that comes close enough, but something in his gut tells him that a thoughtless choice would haunt him like nothing else. So he studies each little disc as they spin past him, rejecting design after design until he’s certain far more than seven have slid past his gaze.

Finally, finally he sees the one. A trick of the light, perhaps, but Hunk swears that it flashes, winks at him like a starburst, and he grabs it before it can vanish or shift. He studies it where it shivers, shudders, in his palm like a trapped bird. The design is simple and blocky where all the others had been complicated and elegant. A heavy stylized ‘V’ underneath a thick inked profile of a lionhead roaring. The dense lines and pared down image appealing to something deep in his soul.

“This one,” he says, not taking his eyes off the little disc. “I think this one.”

Her smile is a brittle thing. 

“Ah,” she sighs. “Now there is a seal we’ve not seen in a thousand, thousand, thousand years.”

In a move so fast he can’t register it, she flips the disc over and down into his palm. He can feel the raised edges bite into his flesh, cold and sharp, for a half second before Haggar opens her mouth and a horrifying cacophony of syllables pour out. He jerks in her grasp, desperate to clasp his hands to his ears. Desperate to block out the terrifying sounds that swell in the air between them.

The disc grows hot on his palm. First enough to make a sweat break out across his entire body. Then building, slowly, terrifyingly as those horror-terror syllables build and break in slithering crescendos. He knows what’s coming and he can only wait for the pain with panicked, sickened anticipation. 

When the pain comes, it comes with the stench of burning flesh and his hysterical whimpers. Haggar holds his hand in gentle grip, her fish-belly pale fingers gripping him like steel. Her voice a slip-slide hiss of sounds no mortal was ever meant to hear. Hunk can’t even drop to his knees as the pain slices through him, whiting out everything else until all he can hear is his own broken screaming. Haggar’s hands keep him trapped as silver steadily radiates across from his palm from under that deceptively tiny disc. 

Slowly, achingly, Haggar falls silent and shattering agony across his palm resolves itself to a knife-slice of pain that throbs in time with his own frantic heartbeats. He drops to his knees like a forgotten bag of coal when she releases her grip on his hands. He curls around his ruined hand, cradling it to his chest, and fights to control his sobs. The smell of his own scorched skin heavy in the air.

She kneels beside him, her skirts a graceful pool of silk and velvet. Haggar pries his hand from his chest and presses two black-tipped fingers against the burn, making him gasp and shudder at the icy touch. The sudden chill that chases the burn is almost worse than the burn itself and he screams anew, tears sliding down his face, drenching his shirt.

“There,” Haggar says, full of satisfaction, as if she were a crafter herself and finished a bit of tricky business. “Your seal is set and done. All who see it will know where you rule. And who rules you.”

She leaves him there in his newly formed workshop with the darkness that seethes and roils around him, cradling his hand in mute, pain-stricken horror. It’s not until her skirts sweep through the doors and they swing silently shut that he allows himself to weep in truth.

   
ii. (the difference is less and more than you think)

The first few days of gilded captivity Hunk can barely drag himself out of bed, hunched around his mauled hand and trembling in the darkness and silence of his workshops. The silvered brand glows in the gloom and he sometimes finds himself hysterically wondering if he could use it as a flashlight against the dark.

He marvels at it, sometimes, sitting in the middle of the (his) wondrous workshop. Surrounded by trinkets and objects of unspeakable power it’s the glowing brand in the middle of his right palm that captivates him in the middle of the night. Or what he thinks is the night. He misses the sun.

But the human ability to adjust, to acclimate, no matter how horrible the situation is a wondrous thing.

Hunk finds himself talking to the shadows, no longer frightened when they seem to respond. Long tendrils of shadow and void wrapping themselves along the walls to form archways to impossible gardens, doors to libraries that could have been if Alexandria had not burned. He explores the edges of his cage and slowly comes to accept it when the rooms shape themselves to his wants and wishes. He crafts himself great glowing lights and sets them about his workspace—flooding it with glittering light. 

And finally, finally, he adapts. 

The days stretch and bleed and merge themselves into something that approaches a routine. 

Hunk isn’t certain of the number of days that he’s spent in this silver and shadowed realm—time moves uncertainly around him. He sleeps when tired—that first night a sturdy four-corner bed piled high with thick pillows and rich furs presented itself when his tears had finally slowed, leaving him exhausted and shaking. He eats when hungry—random tables and trays laden with rare and exquisite delicacies appear and disappear always a half-heartbeat before he realizes his body’s demands. Bathes in a pool gleaming, spice-scented water that he found hidden in a far nook. And in between those times he works.

Hunk learns how to summon and dismiss the waiting air with word and gesture. Eventually, habituation brought by extended contact, numbs him to the infinite strangeness of the pressing darkness and its whispering stillness.

Haggar comes and goes; her whims as unpredictable as a summer storm.

She brings him ancient diagrams depicting armours made of no material he’s ever heard of—dimertium ore, zerrikan powder, and endrega plasma—and designs for weapons tempered with dragon’s blood and wraith dust. When he complains that he’s never heard of such things and has no idea where to find them she shrugs with dismissive disinterest.

“There are always heroes, noble heart,” she tells him as if noting the weather or the fact that one plus one equals two. “One of them will bring these things to you.”

She presents him with descriptions of bracelets, earrings, coronets, and rings both majestic and whimsical. 

She comes to him with ideas for machines wild and bizarre. 

(“Why do you want something that only exists to play the first 30 seconds of a song endlessly?”

“Because it amuses me and infuriates others.”

Sometimes he’s not certain if he’s dealing with the mistress of an ancient and alien court or a five-year-old child.)

She fills his hands (fills his head) with designs for tools that are improbable, impossible, and—when he crafts them—break every law of physics he ever knew.

She gifts him materials fine and strange that smoke in his hands and paint his workshop in myriad impossible lights.

She sulks when he tells her that he doesn’t know magic and could not craft a ward to save his soul. Then she brings him book after book after book written runes and glyphs that shift under his gaze and yet he always somehow understands what they say. Haggar’s laughter is high and delighted the first time he tells her he sees very little difference between differential calculus and alchemical notation.

Sometimes Haggar lurks in his workshop without any particular agenda or demand, seemingly content to drape herself over his crafting tables or lean against a wall as he works the forge bellows. Her blade-sharp form folds into spaces as if they had always held her. The first time he snaps at her—overheated and cranky—that if she is going to take up space in his forge she might as well make herself useful he nearly swallows his own tongue in terror. But she merely chuckles to herself and summons into existence little imps that are as frustrating as they are helpful. 

Their smoke and sputtering fire forms slink after him—hissing at water and melting tools with equal abandon.

“My lady,” he almost growls—the snarled word coming perilously close insult and her arched eyebrow alerts him to his danger. “Forgive my insolence, but these …” he waves his hands at one creature of smoking shadow that smells vaguely of brimstone, “things are not exactly what I meant by useful.”

She considers her nails in theatrical disinterest. “And why would I be concerned with your conceptions of usefulness?”

Hunk’s hot. He’s tired. His shirt sticks to him in uncomfortable ways. He’s lost his hair ties. He’s been trying to follow this diagram for armour made from dragon scales and griffon feathers for the past however the fuck long and he is completely, spectacularly, and probably fatally done. 

He sets his tongs down carefully, using the time to try to wrestle his temper and his tongue into something approaching politeness. He knows she tolerates his little outbursts and moments of snide sarcasm, but he’s not sure how far he can push that tolerance. It is unwise, he knows—he knows, to press the bounds of her goodwill. But he simply cannot work with her little soot and sulfur creatures making a disaster of his workshop.

“My lady,” he says, tone careful and measured. “I would think you might have at least a little care because if I cannot work then I cannot create the things you ask of me. And I cannot work with these … things wrecking my workshop.”

She blinks at him as lazy as any cat. “Then make them stop, artificer,” she says as if it were as easy as breathing. “These are your workshops, are the not? This is your domain?”

Hunk stares at her, eyes narrowing in suspicion, and she returns his gaze with faint amusement, as if he were about to do a particularly clever trick. “You’ve said that before,” he says slowly. “That this is my domain. But I’m not sure what you mean by that, exactly.”

Haggar yawns then, an exaggerated move that shows her dainty, yellowed fangs. “I mean what I have said. This is your domain, given to you when I set your seal. You rule here, artificer.”

He crosses his arms over his chest, a horrible idea sliding into place in his head. He can feel his chin tilt slowly down and to the side (a move he’s terribly afraid comes from her, that slow predatory shift of focus) to contemplate the two little smoke and smoldering fire creatures where they toss a casting mold back and forth between each other. “Stop that,” he growls at them low in his throat. “Put those back where you found them.”

They move with alacrity to obey him. 

He points to one. “Begone.”

It vanishes in a flare of fire with a wail of despair. It’s companion flickers with something that could almost be considered terror. Hunk considers it with something almost like guilt coiling in his gut, almost but not quite. The little inkblot-and-smoke form trembles and shivers before him—form barely holding together.

“You can stay,” he decides and its form surges in response. “But you do as I say, move as I say you can move, and you stop touching my tools.”

The imp curls in on itself, all its smoke tendrils pulling in tight. He takes that as agreement and turns back to Haggar. She claps slowly, a smile curling over her face. It reminds him, weirdly, of the old Grinch Who Stole Christmas cartoon when he was a kid. He half expects her hair to curl up into little licks of hair and then must bite the inside of his mouth—hard--to keep from laughing.

“Well done, artificer,” she croons. “Learning your first lessons in command. In magic.”

Something in her tone makes him instantly defensive and suspicious. What he’s seen of magic from the books she’s brought him, littered carelessly about his workshops like forgotten toys, it’s not that much different from advanced mathematics. He distrusts her insinuating tone and sly, conspirator’s smirk. “I’m not sure I understand your meaning.”

She shoves herself off the wall where she had been lounging, lanky and languid, to slink towards the remaining soot imp. It shudders at her approach. She trails her long, pale fingers through its murky form, dragging out great tendrils of smoke into the air around it. “The first lesson of magic, noble heart, is will.” Haggar turns to look at him, her great yellow eyes gleaming like things seen at the edge of the forest at nightfall. “Your will must be stronger than all others. Stronger than the weft and weal of nature. Stronger than pulse and pull of time. Stronger than form and force of reality.”

Hunk opens his mouth to protest. Laws of physics are laws for a reason, no amount of wishing can change them. But she moves faster than a wish, faster than thought, to press one long, sharp-tipped finger against his lips. A little harder, he thinks, and she could slice straight through them. “No,” she whispers, soft as a lover sharing secrets. “Do not waste my time with what you think you know.”

He closes his mouth and swallows hard. “Will?”

“You’ll learn,” she tells him. “In this workshop of yours. Or it will destroy you.”

With that deeply comforting thought she turns on one heel and leaves as suddenly as she came. 

Hunk stares down at the little soot imp who has once again condensed itself into a shivering ball of smoke so dense he can see little flickers of fire building in its form.

“Well,” he tells it. “That was informative.”

///

He decides to call the little soot sprite Lazy. It shivers in apparent delight.

Haggar laughs and laughs and laughs when she catches him grousing at it, frustrated that it would only ever work if he’s actively yelling at it.

“Next time,” she tells him. “Name it something more conducive to labour. What were you expecting when you named it Lazy?”

When he grumps at her—that information would have been much more helpful before he’d named the little thing—she laughs again and runs glacial fingers through his sweat-streaked hair.

///

He doesn’t forget her warning. But he can only spend so long watching the roiling shadows of his workshop with trepidation. Humans, after all, are built to acclimate, adjust, even if the situation is otherwise untenable. 

He adapts.

Haggar smiles with all her fangs showing when she finds him ordering whatever entities throng about his workshop—unseen but ever present, ever desiring to be helpful—to give him some half-forgotten tool or hold a diagram for him in the empty air.

“Will,” she croons. “You are learning to exercise it.”

///

The day he flicks his fingers in the empty air and calls forth a long, blood-red couch for her to lounge upon she grips his cheeks between both corpse-pale hands and presses kisses all over his face. The sudden burst of affection leaves him breathless—caught between terror and something he doesn’t want to study too deeply.

///

Hunk almost doesn’t hear her when she comes with a compact boy trailing after her, a sullen and hostile figure tethered to her by a length of silken cord tied to a high, fitted collar about his neck. She presents him with the silk leash, every inch of her radiating self-satisfied pleasure. It reminds him of nothing so much as of Lance when he had managed to find the perfect gift and then practically vibrated out his skin with eagerness to give it. The comparison makes Hunk queasy, forcing him to swallow hard against the suddenly rising bile.

“I have brought you a gift, my noble heart!” Haggar all but sings, delighted with herself. The boy glares at them both from his end of the length of silk. “A guard for your door, a knight-errant for your errands, a test specimen for your projects! Whatever your heart might wish.”

Hunk takes the silken lead from her in mute shock. Just when he thought nothing could horrify him about her anymore, he thinks in dumb-founded horror, she goes and finds something new. He stares at the bit of silk in his hands with blank incomprehension. He cannot force his mind to wrap itself around the fact that she has just given him another person—a smudge of barely sentient soot sprite is one thing, a boy who snarls and glares is another—like she’s giving him a bit of Christmas chocolate. 

“Go, go,” she urges, her hands fluttering about him like dying birds. “Look him over. I think you will find him quite suitable.”

He drags his gaze up from the silk in his hands into the furious gaze at the other end. Hunk wants to beg forgiveness for this monstrous assault to dignity and self, but he knows in the marrow of the bones that to do so would damn them both. Gathering the jagged edges of his courage together, he forces himself to look over the boy with a critical eye. Dragging forward that coldly clinical mind that got him through advanced biology and all those horrible dissections (there was something cruel about forcing people to dissect cats) he looks over that leanly muscled figure with its defiant chin and rage-filled gaze.

Hunk wraps the end of the silken lead around his hand once, twice, thrice, until the boy at the end is forced to stumble towards him or be choked. 

He cocks his head to the side and lets his gaze sweep over the boy, the part of his mind that never stops cataloguing and organizing taking over. Straight limbs, strong body, and callused hands suggest an ability to work the bellows. A sharp, calculating gaze indicating a clever and capable mind. The defiant and furious posture suggesting a will strong enough to withstand his workshops’ shifting and mercurial nature. 

Hunk turns back to Haggar and dregs up a smile for her, ignoring the way it makes the boy blanch. “Where did you find him? I could not ask for better.”

Haggar shrugs one lean shoulder in studied indifference. “Around,” she says and the boy shoots her an incredulous look—Hunk takes note. It’s not the first time she’s not-quite lied to him. “One cannot be asked to track each and every mortal that might be loitering about the place.”

“He’s a generous gift,” Hunk says and part of his mind screams and screams and screams. 

He stares at the other boy and tries to will him to understand his complete and total horror at the situation while Haggar coos around them. Hunk wonders idly, in the part of his mind that remains ever calm and logical, if the boy is entirely human. Surely no one born within the mortal lands has actual purple eyes, but here is this sturdy ball of rage and defiance with eyes the colour of fresh verbana. 

Haggar runs her hands down the boy’s arms and Hunk suppresses a sympathetic shudder. “I thought you might think him so!” 

She shoves him into Hunk’s arms and grins up at him, with the same delight Hunk imagines cats feel when presenting humans with freshly killed mice. The boy stumbles and Hunk reaches out automatically to catch him. They both flinch at the contact. If Haggar notices their awkward shirking from one another, she gives no sign. 

“I will leave you with him,” she announces over the boy’s shoulder. Hunk keeps his hands wrapped around those corded shoulders, resisting the urge to draw him into a protective hug. “If you decide to use him a specimen in your projects, you must tell me! I would be ever pleased to provide you any assistance you may require.”

At that the boy’s shoulders shudder and Hunk’s hands tremble.

“I was thinking,” Hunk replies, trying to keep his voice light and conversational. “That I need an assistant, because Lazy is, well, Lazy.”

At that Haggar laughs, high and girlish. “Next time, my noble heart, name your attendants better!”

Hunk gives her what he hopes is a rueful smile. “I will keep that in mind, my lady.”

He remains standing with his hands on the boy’s shaking shoulders as Haggar gives him a jaunty wave and disappears back out the heavy double doors of his workshops. He doesn’t let go until the door slide silently shut and they are left in the awful silence punctuated only by their ragged breathing. 

Hunk yanks his hands away from the boy’s shoulders as if burned and drags his hands down his face. “Okay, so. That was a new horrible thing that she’s done,” he says with a voice that barely shakes.

The boy before him snorts in what Hunk hopes is humor. “New to the fae?”

“I … I don’t even know,” Hunk replies honestly. “I’m not sure how long I’ve been here.”

That gets him a skeptical look and Hunk shrugs in helpless frustration. “Time doesn’t mean much here and I only ever see Haggar.”

The boy is so close that his faint laugh ghosts across Hunk’s collarbones, making him shiver with memories that he ruthlessly suppresses. “I’m not sure who I should pity here. You or me, and I just got given away as a slave.”

“No!” Hunk denies that with jerky shake of his head. “You are not my slave. Not ever. I don’t care what she says.”

That gets him an amused head cock. “Says the guy holding the end of my leash.”

Hunk drops the silk lead so fast someone would think it was made of venomous snakes, hands flying above his head in the classic ‘look, Ma, I’m not touching it!’ gesture. “Fuck! No. I just. I didn’t think tha—Look, I mean—“

The boy cuts him of with callused fingers pressed against Hunk’s lips and the suggestion of a smirk hovering over his mouth. “I get it.”

Hunk slowly his hands with a shaky breath. “I’m sorry she’s so fucking awful.”

“Is she yours to apologize for?” the boy asks in return, head cocked, and the question sounds honestly curious.

Hunk blinks and then finds himself unwilling to consider that question, that path of conversation, too closely. “I guess not,” he mumbles into his chest. “Do you have name? I can’t keep calling you ‘the boy’ inside my head.”

“I’m not a boy,” says the boy scowling so hard Hunk is a little concerned his face will permanently set that way. 

Hunk laughs softly too himself, because gods damn was that response predictable. No magic required, just basic understanding of human nature and teenage male ego. But even so he holds up his hands in the universal symbol of piece. “Toafilemu, manamea,” he soothes. “Calm down, it was just a figure of speech.”

That gets him a narrow-eyed look of pure suspicion. If Hunk ever had a need to bottle suspicion, he was pretty sure that he could use him as a harvesting vector. Instead he provides a peace offering, an olive branch. “Look, my name is Hunk. If you are hungry there’s food literally everywhere. If you are tired there’s my bed or maybe the walls will spit one out for you. I don’t know what to do about boredom. I work any time my head will shut up long enough.”

The distrust he gets in return is tangible thing—palpable like the clouds of a summer storm. “Okay then, Hunk,” and in his mouth Hunk’s name turns into an insult. That’s a first. “What do you want to know.”

Hunk sighs with frustrated annoyance sitting heavy on his brow. “Your name might be nice.”

That earns him a long, complicated look. “… Keith. My name is Keith.”

Hunk holds out a hand as easy as anything. “Hi, Keith. My name is Tsuyoshi Garret, but you can call me Hunk.”

Keith blinks at him long and slow. “You should be careful of who you give your real name to.”

Hunk feels both eyebrows arch, blindsided by the statement. “You just gave me your real name.”

Keith laughs then, a surprisingly bitter sound. “Are you sure about that,” he asks as his lips quirk in the sudden flash of a smile. “I could have lied.”

Hunk shrugs, grimacing a little as his shirt sticks and grates against his skin heavy with sweat from time spent before the forge. “You could have. I don’t think you did though?”

Keith’s next words are muffled and Hunk misses them as he yanks his shirt up and overhead, no longer able to tolerate the feeling of it clinging to him. When he manages to get it off, shaking his hair out and tugging his arms through the sleeves, Keith has fallen silent. Hunk blinks and flicks a glance over his shoulder to where Keith stares resolutely at the far wall. “Is my workshop being strange again,” he asks, concern heavy in his tone. “It likes to play tricks if you aren’t careful.”

Keith makes a sound in the back of his throat that Hunk can’t quite interpret and then shakes his head hard enough that his hair whips about his face. Hunk pats his shoulder in sympathy guessing that he doesn’t want to show any fear in this new place. “It’s not bad, really,” he soothes. “You just have to be really firm with it. Like with a cat that won’t stay off the counter.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Keith says faintly, looking slightly dazed.

Hunk shifts on his feet, suddenly feeling awkward with his shirt bunched in his hands and Keith still in a high, leather collar with that fucking silken lead pooling around their feet. 

“Here, let me undo that,” he says, reaching towards Keith’s neck. He blinks when Keith jerks back, hands going protectively to the collar and his neck. “Or not.”

“You can’t,” Keith hisses, furious and terrified all over again. “I won’t let you.”

Hunk lets his hands fall. “I think I’m missing something here. Why not? I mean, not that I’m judging or anything, but why do you want to keep wearing … that?”

Keith shoots him a disbelieving glare and keeps his hands wrapped around the collar. “You really don’t know anything do you?”

“I guess not?” Hunk replies with a shrug. 

“The way she acts around you,” Keith says more to himself than to Hunk. His gaze slides away from Hunk’s to study the workshop filled to overflowing with Hunk’s tools and half-finished projects. “All the things she’s given you. And you don’t have an ownership mark?”

“A what now?” Hunk asks, this time with a little more force. 

Keith shudders at the tone and drops his hands in a gesture that looks like defeat. Something in Hunk’s heart pings for him, and he sort of wants to comfort Keith, but even more than that he wants answers. He studies the other boy with narrow-eyed thoughtfulness.

“I think you should explain yourself,” Hunk says and the tone that he takes with Lazy, with his workshop when it gets mischievous, bleeds into his voice. 

Keith swallows so hard at that, Hunk can see his Adam’s apple bob with the force of it. “Ownership marks are things that the lord and ladies of the court use to show that a particular mortal is their … favorite,” he says in perfect monotone, as if reciting a multiplication table. “A mark can be almost anything, really. A necklace, a bracelet, a leather cuff.”

Hunk feels suddenly ill, remembering the wide and wild variety of jewelry and bits of decoration that Haggar has brought him to craft. How many, he wonders, had been used to mark another person as owned, as a slave. Used to strip someone of their dignity, autonomy, and very self. 

“What happens,” Hunk asks softly, hands twisting together. “To mortals who don’t have one?”

When Keith looks at him, his eyes hold the bleakness of a dead star. “I don’t think you really want that answer.”

Hunk rubs the back of his neck with one hand, shirt draped over his arm. “Probably not,” he agrees and tries hard not to think of Lance with some bit of pretty metal wrapped around his finger, arm, or throat. Lance at the end of a silken leash. Or, worse, Lance without any of that. “Are these … marks always something like that?”

Keith shrugs, the gesture somehow desolate. “I’ve never seen anything else.”

Hunk holds up his right hand where his palm glows with shivering silver light. “How about something like this?”

“Holy fuck,” Keith breathes and grabs Hunk’s wrist with both hands to drag his hand down to peer at it. “Holy shit.”

Hunk lets him trace the brand and fights not shiver at the whisper soft touch of callused fingers across his sensitive palms. Tries not to think of how long it’s been since warm, mortal fingers have touched his skin. Tries not to think how long corpse-pale, glacier-cold fingers have run along his arms, his face, his hair. 

“She called it a seal,” he says instead of shuddering under Keith’s wondering exploration. “When she burned it into me.”

Keith laughs, low and disbelieving. “I’ve only seen fae with these marks,” he explains without looking up. “Fae who rule the minor courts.”

Hunk shuts his eyes hard against the sudden, dizzying vertigo that threatens to overtake him. “I’m not fae.”

“Then what are you,” Keith asks, hands still clenched around his wrist like it was the only thing tethering him to the world. “Why do you have this, if you aren’t fae?”

“I don’t know,” Hunk replies, anger and despair lacing his tone in equal measure. 

Keith gives him a suspicious look—one that suggests hurt under its distrust. “As you will,” he says. “You are the lord here.”

Hunk rubs his knuckles across his lips as if he could press the warmth of Keith’s touch into them. “Yeah,” he mutters more to himself than anything else. “She said that once.”

“She said that?” Keith squawks, his attempt to distance himself—to pretend to be the obedient servant, apparently forgotten as suddenly as it was attempted. “Like, she actually said that to you?”

Hunk blinks at him, confused. “Yeah? When she set the seal she said it would show where I rule, and who rules me.”

Keith just stares at him, chewing on his bottom lip, until they both shift awkwardly. “Okay,” he says, bafflement a tangible thing in his voice. “Okay. I … don’t know what to say to that.”

“I don’t know what to say to, like, ninety percent of what she does,” Hunk offers. “I just try to survive it.”

“Amen to that,” Keith mutters so quietly Hunk’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to hear it, so he politely pretends that he doesn’t.

“Anyway,” Hunk says, studiously folding his sweat-stiffened shirt. “I need a bath. And you probably need food and a chance to think.” He looks over the other boy, grimaces at the silken lead. “At the very least, take off that damned leash and burn it.”

Keith nods, looking stunned again. “I, uh. Yeah. Food would be good.” 

Hunk holds his right palm out and curls two fingers to it before making a sharp gesture down. A small table and chair erupt from the workshop floor and immediately start filling to overflowing with food and drink. “Take whatever you like. If you don’t like anything, yell at it a bit until it stops being a brat.”

Keith’s eyes are huge as he watches. “Are you sure you aren’t fae?”

“Positive,” Hunk replies drily. “I think I would have noticed if I became one.”

He leaves Keith to eat, or not, without another word.

///

A long soak in the bathing pools helps Hunk bring his scattered thoughts back into some semblance of order. Sinking into the scented water, Hunk blows out a long, rattling breath and tries not to feel like he’s run through a particularly complicated labyrinth. One where a wrong turn would drop him—and now, he realizes with sick horror, Keith—into the abyss.

He scrubs his hands across his face and through his hair, resisting the urge to pull at it. Just when he’s getting a handle on his ever-shifting realm, Haggar of course has to throw him another curve ball. Hunk rolls his shoulders under the water making it slosh across the pool in rippling waves. Dragging a deep breath into his lungs he dunks himself under the water, letting it climb up his face and spread his hair like a great fan around his head.

Sprawled across the bottom of the pool he drums his fingers against the smooth stone. 

“Okay, Hunk, you certainly have a mess on your hands now,” he says to the tiled ceiling of the bathing chamber once he lets himself float back to the surface. 

Hunk sighs out a slow breath, counting each beat, and then lets his analytical mind--the part that never stops cataloguing, sorting, sifting—take over. He treats the situation like the beginning of a design spec. Identify the problem, break it down into its component parts, then find solutions for each part that work together. Simple. Like building a new engine from the ground up. So:

Problem: Haggar had just given him a living, breathing, thinking mortal boy as a gift.

A gift.

And at that his entire mind just shuts down.

He just doesn’t know what to do with that. Obviously, he can’t give Keith back. Gods only knew what Haggar would make of that. What she would do to Keith. What she would do to either of them. Hunk blows frustrated bubbles in the water, retreating for a moment to juvenile expressions of irritation.

He doesn’t know if he can trust Keith. He could be a spy for Haggar for all Hunk knows. (Hunk seriously doubts there’s any way that could actually be true. Every thought and emotion that boy has ripples across his face as fast the clouds over the sea.) He probably has his own agenda, Hunk thinks to himself. Hunk hopes Keith has his own agenda. It’s too terrible to think of someone being trapped in these silver and emerald halls with no whim or will.

And then there are the entire second order of problems that he’d refused to let himself contemplate until Keith, Hunk realizes morosely. The internecine politics to which he had been turning a blind eye. The push and pull of power across the courts to which he’s deaf and dumb to for as long as he remains shut up in his workshops. Hunk drags himself to the ledge of the pool and contemplates his situation. 

He’s gotten comfortable in his workshop. He’s settled down within its walls and routines and carved out a sense of belonging for himself, Hunk realizes with horrified fascination. He wonders briefly if Haggar had intended the slow normalization of his life within the stone bower of his smithy, his workshop, his looms and great stone ovens. 

Hunk drags a hand through his hair, then both of them, then grips his hair near his scalp so hard it pulls with a sharp ache. He would love to blame this on Haggar and her sly, conspiratorial smile, but he knows without a shadow of doubt in his heart of hearts that he had done this to himself. 

Haggar had provided the frame, but Hunk’s the one who had hung the walls and made his gilded cage into his new home.

It’s one of his great failings, he knows, the tendency to settle, to nest, to surround himself with the known and the familiar and then refuse to leave that place of comfort. The only way he’s ever moved beyond the barriers of his own making is with Lance kicking and squalling the entire time. It’s always been Lance pushing him to be more, do more, try more, and without Lance the last dregs of that fire simply petered out and died. 

Hunk tightens his hands in his hair even more, curling into a tight ball, his face almost in the water as he hunches forward. He’s allowed himself to forget the entire reason he’s even in these silver and shadow halls—seduced by a workshop that could be anything and everything he ever wanted. Seduced, if he’s truly honest, by Haggar’s quick and brilliant mind. 

He grinds his teeth hard until he can feel his molars begin to ache with the pressure. 

He wonders then—hands fisted in his hair, eyes screwed up tight against the dawning truth, curled so tight his forehead almost touches his belly—if he would have ever even thought to venture beyond these comforting walls if Haggar had not brought him Keith. He wonders why she brought him the sullen and hostile boy. If she thought Keith would keep him even more sedate, less adventurous, slowly forgetful of pride and purpose. 

Hunk yanks his mind from that bitter spiral before it can explode into the destructive circle of anxiety and self-hatred that it is wont to do. 

Slowly, and in time with a deep breath in and a deep breath out—chest rising and failing like the sea rolling out with the tides, Hunk forces himself to release his grip on his hair. He uncurls one tight clenched finger and then another and then another until his hands are finally unfisted from his hair. With a breath so deep he can feel it rattle through his core, making his diaphragm burn, he sits up and leans back against the edge of the pool. He drags his hands out of the water to peer at them—wrinkled from long exposure to the water but still rough with calluses. Lance would complain, he knows, if he tried to lay his soft, pampered skin.

The memory of Lance and his complicated skin care routines makes Hunk smile. 

Deep breath in, deep breath out, and Hunk hauls himself out of the pool, water cascading down his arms, hips and legs. He flicks his fingers at the wall, a quick gesture that took him a while to get right—his fingers too thick to perform it easily, and stone rolls back to reveal an alcove of soft towels heavy and dense. He marvels, again and mostly likely not for the last time, at the fact that they wrap all the way around his frame. He chews on his bottom lip for a moment, tears blurring his vision, remembering Lance’s giggle every time Hunk had to knot two towels together to get them to wrap around himself.

Hunk breathes in, feeling his chest expand and shoulders roll back, eyes fluttering closed for a moment. Then breathes out hard against the threatening tears and sudden vise-grip of memory around his heart. Knotting the towel tightly around his hips and rolling his shoulders back, he goes in search of Keith. 

///

In retrospect, Hunk realizes, it’s not at all surprising that Lazy found Keith. Little bastard probably slunk up the second Hunk’d stepped out of the room. He watches, eyebrows beetling down into a scowl, as the slip of smoke and soot coils and uncoils itself in happy undulations next to Keith’s chair, begging for scraps and trying to be cute. Keith, to his credit, seems more bemused than anything else. 

Keith has also gotten rid of the silken lead once attached to his collar, Hunk’s very pleased to note. While he’d rather Keith not wear the collar at all, he’ll take steps towards that as progress.

Hunk watches him offer bits of toast and cured meats to Lazy, who accepts them with little flickers of muted flame and happy crackles. 

“Careful doing that,” Hunk warns, politely ignoring the way Keith jerks in surprise, hiding his hands under his thighs like a little boy caught stealing cookies. “Once Lazy has you marked as a sucker he’ll never let you alone.”

Lazy flares out in a burst of diffused smoke before pulling back in itself with a hiss of compressing air. Hunk rolls his eyes and flicks the water still dripping off him from the bath at the little sprite. “Don’t give me that, menace, I know you.”

Keith’s gaze flicks between Hunk and Lazy, eyes blown wide, lip caught between his teeth. “What, uh, what is it?”

Hunk shrugs. “Dunno. Haggar called ‘em up one time when I complained at her about not having any help.” He scowls down at the sprite as it slinks across the stone floor to curl gently around his ankles. “I just got out of the bath,” he says, nudging—as much as one can nudge a semi-corporeal bit of smoke—the sprite with one foot. “Knock that off.”

“Haggar … called it up for you,” Keith repeats slowly, face making a complicated expression that Hunk has a hard time interpreting. “Because you complained at her.”

“Yuh,” Hunk agrees, eyebrow raising slightly. “That’s what I said.”

“I, uh,” Keith’s voice trails off. “Huh.”

“Well. She called up two of them,” Hunk says, by way of explanation. “But they were wrecking my workshops, playing with my tools and making a mess of things. So I banished one, named this one, and now I have, like, half an assistant.”

“It had a brother?” Keith asks, looking inexplicably sad. “And you sent it away?”

Hunk cocks his head. “When you put it like that, it sounds kinda bad.”

Keith twists his hands in his sleeves and looks away, gaze sliding to the floor, bangs falling to hide his eyes. “It can be hard to be the only one. To be the one left behind.”

Hunk heaves a huge sigh. “Okay, now I definitely feel bad.” Lips pursed he studies Lazy, who shivers and undulates on the floor. “Alright, menace, should I call back your friend?”

Lazy explodes into rapidly diffusing tendrils before coalescing back down into a dense ball of smoke, soot, and little flickers of flame. It crackles and spits in a way Hunk takes to be happy and beseeching. Hunk sighs again, hard enough to make his wet bangs flap against his face. 

“Fine, fine. Wait until I dry off,” he tells Lazy—tells Keith—both of them watching him with an air of hopeful pleading. “Man, I just got cleaned off and y’all want me to go summoning things out of the forge again.”

“You can summon?” Keith repeats, and then bites his lip so hard it turns white, as if he got caught asking a question he shouldn’t.

“In theory,” Hunk replies, re-hitching the towel around his hips. “I haven’t actually tried it.”

Keith doesn’t say anything in reply, just stares at him with wide eyes the colour of verbena. Hunk waits a solid minute for him to reply and then shrugs when it becomes obvious that words have deserted the other boy. 

“Anyway,” Hunk says, suddenly remembering the reason he had come straight from the bath to find Keith. “I wanted to talk about the courts.” 

Keith blinks, flush climbing his cheeks and across the tops of his ears, and his hands twist in his lap. Hunk cocks his head, eyes narrowing, suspicious of the sudden shyness when before the boy had been damned chatty about all he knew about the courts. “I mean, you do know about them, right? You certainly seemed to know more than I did.”

He pins Keith with his best flinty-eyed look—the one he used to use on Lance when he was being shifty about doing his differential equations homework. Keith, just like Lance used to, squirms for a couple of heartbeats and then curls in on himself, ears definitely red. “I mean, maybe?”

“Maybe?” Hunk repeats in a flat tone before pulling himself up to his full height to glower down at Keith’s shrinking form. Hunk is not in the mood to get messed about with, not after everything Haggar has thrown at him today. Something in him cringes, winces, at how he casually intimidates the other boy. As dislocating, disorienting, the day’s events have been for him, Hunk knows—he knows--they have been magnitudes worse for Keith. Yet this is about Lance, and he has never had a sense of restraint when it comes to Lance.

Keith refuses to meet his eyes and something in Hunk’s heart curls into a ball and cries, is sickened beyond all words, by what he’s doing, but he doesn’t stop. He drops a heavy hand on Keith’s shoulder, feels the shudder that rattles through that deceptively slender frame. “Keith,” Hunk says, his voice crawling out his throat at gravel level. “I need to know.”

A shiver like an earthquake shivers through Keith’s frame, but he draws in a ragged breath. “W-what,” Keith swallows hard, tries again. “What do you need to know?”

Hunk stares down at the dark head, the wild curls, and debates for a heartbeat how to approach things. Direct, he decides as if there is any choice, direct is the best way. “I need to know if you ever met a boy, a mortal boy our age, named Lance.”

Keith’s head comes up slow, his eyes flat and blank, and Hunk’s heart clenches in his chest like an engine seizing. “What is he to you?”

It takes Hunk a moment to find his breath, to wrestle it back into a regular rhythm, hope is a wild animal clawing at his breast. “He’s my friend”—Keith’s eyes lock on his, the expression in them beyond his ability to understand—“he’s my best friend.”

“Oh,” Keith breaths, nods. “Okay. That, that makes sense.”

Hunk’s throat clenches down like he’s choking on his own heart. “How does that make sense?”

Keith shakes his head. “I—I. No, just,” Keith blows out a breath. “I was wondering how Haggar got you here,” he explains, and Hunk can hear the odd note in his tone, but doesn’t know where to place it. “Because there’s no way someone like you would be here for any other reason. So. Yeah. Makes sense.” Keith looks up, his face full of rueful resignation that Hunk just doesn’t understand. “You love him?”

Hunk goes the colour of tomatoes. He can feel the flush explode across his cheeks, down his chest. It’s one thing to have Haggar put a name for the feelings that threaten to overwhelm him every time he thinks about Lance—his laugh, his quick fingers, his gentle voice—and another to have this boy made of defiance and rage say it without an ounce of artifice or guile. 

Hunk blows out a breath. “Yes? Fuck. I.” Hunk shakes his head hard, fixes Keith with a furious glare that almost masks the glimmer of tears. “Have you seen him?”

It takes every ounce of willpower Hunk as not to shake Keith until his teeth rattle right out of his pretty head. 

Keith’s gaze slides from his and he shrugs, cringing away from Hunk’s grasp on him. “I don’t know? It’s not like you really learn someone’s name around here.”

Hunk lets him go. Drags both hands through his hair and has to fight keep from clenching them into fists at the roots. His breath shudders through his frame and he tells himself over and over—a little mantra chanting in his head—that none of this is Keith’s fault. He cannot, will not, use Keith as the emotional punching bag for his frustration and despair.

“If I described him,” he grinds out, his teeth clenched in a predator’s snarl, “could you try to remember?”

Keith’s nod is a tiny, fragile thing, but it’s enough. 

Hunk blows out a breath, drags another in like a smoker with their first hit of nicotine in weeks. “He’s tall, slender like a dancer. He’d say he’s a beanpole but he never did have a good sense of himself.” Hunk chews on his lip for a moment, hands clenching while he wracks his brain for the words—tries to force them out his mouth. “Brown hair like chestnuts, skin that looks like he spends every day of the week on the beach but that’s just him. Uh. Blue eyes—so blue they look like someone poured sapphires in them.”

Keith curls in on himself like he expects to take a punch and Hunk hates himself just a little. “I, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone like that,” he looks up at Hunk, his expression as fragile as newly blown glass. “I think I would have remembered.”

Trying to contain his disappointment, the fresh wave of shrieking sorrow, Hunk nods, his eyes unseeing. “Yeah,” he breathes through his nose, eyes burning. “Yeah, you’d remember him. He’s loud as seven kinds of hell.”

Keith laughs a little at that. “You really love him,” he says rather than asks, tone full of wonder. “Don’t you?”

Hunk tightens his hold on the towel around his waist, shifting on his feet. Keith looks away, flush climbing up his cheek when Hunk scrubs at his eyes—viciously rubbing away the threatening tears. He’s grateful when Keith looks everywhere but at him while he struggles to get himself and his freshly raging grief under control.

“Yeah,” he says, and is proud when his voice only shatters a little. “I do.”

They stand there for a moment, an odd tableau—Keith trying to look anywhere but at Hunk while he tries to force his emotions into something like order. Hunk rolls his shoulders, lets his head roll heavy from side to side, and clenches his jaw until the tendons of his neck burn and ache. And he gets his shit under control. Blows every source of willpower he’s got. Pulls it the fuck together.

“I’m going to go get dressed,” he tells Keith, who nods without looking at him—tips of his ears still red with what Hunk knows is second-hand embarrassment at his emotional breakdown. “And then I’m going to summon back Lazy’s friend.”

Keith just nods, chewing on his bottom lip and keeps his gaze carefully pinned to the far wall.

///

When Hunk comes in search of Keith again—feeling significantly more in control with his hair dry and fresh clothes on his back—he finds the boy sprawled on the stone floor in front of his forge, playing a complicated game of fetch with Lazy.

He watches, thoroughly bemused, as Keith takes a piece of coal—his fingers now coated black with pitch—and tosses it high in the air. Lazy vibrates, form shivering into near transparency, and then surges upward to wrap it up in a tendril of pure fire making the coal explode in flurry of sparks. Keith crooks his fingers in the universal ‘come here’ gesture and Lazy slithers across the stone, form dense to the point of being near tangible. Keith holds out his hand, palm up, and Lazy pulls itself until it becomes a veritable black hole of smoke and soot, then—in a move reminiscent of a cat coughing up a hairball—spits out a bit of ashy coal. Keith grins, open and young, and motions Lazy to move back into position.

Hunk catches the bit of coal as it arches up and over before Lazy can get to it. “You two having fun,” he asks with one brow arching high. Lazy slinks to the floor, flattening across it like a puddle of ash and soot—a move Hunk has learned to interpret as resentful and petulant. Keith squirms under his gaze.

“He seemed bored,” he offers, gaze locked on the floor near Hunk’s feet.

“You know you are getting played for a sucker, right?” Hunk asks idly as he tosses the coal back into the hopper. 

Keith rolls to his feet in one smooth movement and shrugs slightly. “Maybe. He’s cute.”

“It’s a menace,” Hunk corrects.

Lazy spits tiny sparks and seethes around his feet in apparent protest. 

“Don’t you start,” Hunk tells it. “He might be a sucker, but I know you.”

“I’m not a sucker,” Keith protests, and edge of sulky resentfulness crowding into his tone. “He was lonely.”

At that they both turn to Hunk with pleading writ across every part of their bodies. He has long practice at ignoring everything that Lazy can possibly throw at him, but Keith is a new and troubling variable. Hunk scowls at Lazy, who curls up his leg with unrepentant begging, and tries to ignore Keith. 

Keith proves difficult to ignore.

He doesn’t do anything overt. Where Lazy slinks and slithers into Hunk’s personal space, making a nuisance of himself until Hunk capitulates; or where Lance would loudly and flamboyantly make demands and sulk—Keith merely stands quietly next to him, head down, hair spilling forward, looking at him from under the dark sweep of his lashes. 

The pleading is in the slender slope of his shoulders canted towards Hunk. It’s in the slight pout to his lower lip. It’s in the tilt of his head and the soft flutter of his lashes. It’s a subtle, insidious thing that slips under the wall of his studious disinterest. Keith says not one word and Hunk feels the guilt crowd against him like ghosts in a cemetery. 

He throws his hands up into the air in an overly dramatic gesture that Lance would’ve loved. “I’m going to summon it back,” he barks. “Geez, you two.”

Hunk stomps over to the bellows, working them with one hand as he adjusts the flue with another. “If you two are going to be demanding,” he grumps at them. “You can at least be helpful. Lazy! Feed the fire.”

Lazy pours itself into the belly of the forge, long tendrils of soot claiming choice bits of coal to feed into the ever-growing maw of the fire. Hunk raises his right hand, silver brand shining like a star, and calls the most recent book of runes Haggar had left to him. It hovers at eye level, pages flipping open like a fan to the last bit of rune work that he’d been working on. Keith reaches out hesitantly to hold it and Hunk swats his hands away. He thumbs it to the right page, ignoring the soot marks it leaves, and taps the page to pin it.

“Do you need me to read it to you?” Keith asks, fidgeting minutely.

Hunk blinks at him. “Can you read it?”

“Uh.” Keith sidles over to stand next to him and considers the page. “No?”

Hunk gives him a look, shakes his head, and gets back to work. 

It’s difficult to focus with Keith hovering around him like a particularly needy guard dog. Hunk appreciates that he probably feels the need to prove his usefulness but after the he runs into that compact body for the third time—and a boy a solid five inches short than him and half his size should not feel like running into a wall—Hunk feels his patience evaporate. He pulls back from where he and Keith have collided, again, and blows a breath out his nose, searching himself for patience.

He does _not_ like having other people in his work spaces for precisely this reason.

He points to the far end of his forge. “Go over there.”

Keith gives him a confused, wary look—eyebrows pulled down, shoulders hunched—but scurries to obey.

Hunk points to the floor. “Sit.”

Keith sits. 

Hunk holds his palm flat in the universal ‘stop’ position. “Stay.”

Keith huffs a breath and gives him an incredulous look. Hunk feels something squirm in his gut and it feels remarkably like shame. “I just need … space,” he says, feeling his face heat up—and knows the flush crawling up his neck, over his cheeks, to his ears, has precious little to do with the heat of his forge and everything to do with his thoughtless commands. “I can’t work when I’m tripping over you all the time. And I’ll probably set you or myself on fire if we keep that up.”

The arched brow and slight frown that he gets in return lets him know that even though Keith says not a word, a whole lot of judgment had just occurred and none of it in Hunk’s favor. He debates, for a moment, addressing the issue—getting to the root of it then and there, but decides instead to focus on the task at hand. Sometimes actions work better than words. They can talk later about how this entire … situation is going to go.

Lazy, gluttonous little menace that it is, continues to gorge itself on coal and bits of charcoal, filling the air with the heady smell of iron and smoke. Hunk turns back to the book of runes where it hovers waiting for him, bobbing impatiently, and tries to clear his mind of verbena eyes and down-turned lips. 

The spell is relatively simple as far as these things goes: requiring neither signal nor seal drawn upon any surface—merely fire, smoke, and a focused will. 

It takes a moment to align things correctly—to take a step back from the immediate pressure of fire, smoke, and metal to be wrought and into the essence of things. He doesn’t have as much experience with this mental jump as he would like—he’s only attempted it with small things, nothing sentient and sure as fuck nothing as convoluted as Lazy—and the process makes him feel off-balance, that half heartbeat before glorious failure.

But he’s got Keith’s eyes burning into the back of his head, watching every flick and twist of his hands, ever breath drawn ragged and unsure into his chest, and he can’t fail with Keith watching. Not when he’d just ordered him to sit in a corner like a misbehaving dog. 

Do or die, Garrett—he thinks to himself a little bitter, a little despairing—time to do the impossible.

Because it hurts his engineer’s soul in a way that he can’t quite put into words to use magic. It feels like a negation of self when he reaches out to grasp at something that defies every rule of calculus, every law of physics, and make coax it into singing reality. It feels a betrayal of something vital in his soul.

But he sets that side, ignores as he has every time before, and uses the rising frustration and rage to reach into the fire, to reach through the fire, and grab at the essence of it. 

He’s dimly aware of Keith’s shout of alarm—high and boyishly shrill—and wonders distantly if he should have warned him about exactly what a summoning would entail. He’s got precious little time for that idle thought before the magic sweeps over him like the tide coming in—hard and vicious—and yanks him under.

Hunk breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth, and centers himself down and down and down into the core of himself that sits solid and firm like the lava center of an island—settles into the bit of himself that plants his feet and says: ‘no, you fucking move.’ When he opens his eyes, he’s got his fist slammed straight into the center of the fire Lazy has built and kept fed, straight through Lazy, and into heart of fire and ash and all the heat of the creation. 

He can feel Lazy flickering around him like a crazed disco-ball, a frantic flash between fire and ash, sentient and dumb, dead and alive. He reaches past that into the pulsing one-two, one-two, one-two of fire—past the cycle of oxygen, organic material and combustion (CH4 + 2O2—CO2+2H2O)—and into the memory of fire when the stars were young. Something reaches back for him, lazy and indulgent. 

It follows him even as he desperately tries to pull way, to shut down the connection, to block the magic off.

He’s shouting as he falls back, arm upflung, and from his forge bursts something that looks as if fire and shadow had had a bastard lovechild. It grows and shifts as it explodes forward, crowding Hunk back, back, back against the far wall—the seal on his hand burning like a dying star. Curved horns disappear into the rafters of his smithy, wings of pitch brush the walls as they curl idly as if testing for air currents, and great eyes like lava made sentient fix Hunk where he stands, hand outstretch and a spell curling around his mouth. The laugh the beast husks out smells of brimstone and things left long to rot.

“Little magus,” it purrs with a voice that sounds like gravel breaking apart. “You called?”

“I, uh.” His voice fails him, cracking in a way that it hasn’t since he was fifteen. Hunk swallows hard and feels his throat move slow and heavy around the sudden spike of fear. “I believe there has been a mistake.”

The great beast laughs and its laughter is the scream of a forest fire. “Perhaps,” it agrees as it shifts closer, it’s movement the slow slide of magma down a mountainside. “But that mistake has not been made by me.”

He sees out of the corner of his eyes Keith sliding around its side, half blocked from Hunk’s view by a bulk made of molten rock and rage. He snaps his eyes back to the beast, heart a hammer in his chest, and he prays that he did not give the other boy away. Prays that Keith can get out, find Haggar, find anyone. 

“May I ask your name?” Hunk asks, polite, always polite even though the back of his neck is damp with sweat and his shoulders clench against the blow he knows is coming.

“Such that you can cast with it, little magus?” Is the thrumming reply. “I think not.”

Hunk stares up and up and up as it stretches, its horns scraping the shadowed vaults of his workshop. He wishes, not for the first time and probably not for the last, that he had Lance’s gift for words—his effortless ability to engage people and draw them in. But he doesn’t and he can’t. So, he fumbles and stutters. “I meant to call a sprite,” he explains, near whimpers. “I humbly ask your forgiveness.”

“You think to summon me forth on a mistake—as whim,” it asks—tone heavy with incredulity. “And then send me back as if I were nothing more than a traveling troubadour?”

Hunk bites down hard on the urge to apologize again, wrestles it under control and reaches for the ice and logic that lives in the bits of his mind that are always, always, watching, organizing, planning. He knows to apologize again would invite catastrophe. The initial offense was identified, restitution offered and rejected, and thus nothing more along that path could be offered. No, he thinks to himself, now was time for a different approach.

Breathing in through his nose, out through his mouth, Hunk pulls himself to his full height, still meters and meters below the beast’s, and fixes it with a glare. If his chin pulls up in a manner reminiscent of Haggar, if his shoulders square as hers do when angered, if the way his eyes narrow is an echo of hers, there is no one to remark upon it. And for that he is inexplicably grateful. 

“Apology has been offered, apology has been rejected, no alternative wergild has been proffered,” Hunk says, the words fitting strangely in his mouth though he knows them like he knows his own name. “You must by rights bring your complaint to the Courts. You out stay your welcome.”

“And who will force me back, little magus?” It asks as its head bends low, rancid breath a fetid wind across Hunk’s cheek. “You?”

“Too fucking right,” is Keith’s sharp answer—a battle cry of insolence and rage. And Hunk could laugh. He could cry. When the beast screams in agony, form shuddering, as Keith drags a half-finished silver sword across the back of its legs, he wants to die. 

Hunk shouts a wordless warning as that mass of magma and hate turns—horn swinging, wings flaring—to bear down on Keith. His heart climbs its way up his throat and crouches there like a gargoyle. But Keith, every sturdy inch of his frame a live wire, curls his lips back in a feral snarl that shows all his teeth. Hunk watches with helpless wonder and terror as Keith flips the sword around in his hand, bringing it to a guard position all lines of him writ with fury.

The beast’s laughter is a horror of sound caught half between the grating shriek of a gravel avalanche and the piercing wail of a forest fire. Hunk moans low in his throat, certain he’s going to watch this foolhardy boy die a brutal death, when Keith darts forward—faster than any mortal has a right to be—and scores a deep strike across the beast’s flank.

“Get back!” Hunk yells at him, gesturing with his branded hand, the shining silver light making an arc in gloom. “Run!”

Keith rolls, all vicious grace and energy, dodging underneath one massive leg ending a cloven hoof and bringing the sword up in a gleaming swing across the back of its knee. “You run,” he snaps, not even sparing a glance back at Hunk. “I’ve got this.”

Hunk’s mouth drops open in a gape, eyes so wide they almost water, before he manages to snap back to himself. “It’s a massive beast of elemental fire,” he snaps back, running before his brain can catch up to his body. “In what way do you have any of this?”

Not deigning to reply, Keith manages to spring himself up and over the creature’s sweeping tail. A move Hunk cannot replicate and he finds himself smashed into the far wall, breath crushed from his lungs, his very bones rattled by the impact. It takes him several long seconds to pull himself up to his knees—his ribs burn with a pain that promises broken ribs and breathing problems. When he finally drags himself to his feet, he finds Keith set in front of him, sword lowered into guard, feet braced and teeth bared. 

“I’ve got this better than you do!” he barks.

Hunk flings up his right hand, fingers forming arcane patterns, lips wrapping around syllables ancient and alien. The brand on his hand burns with a furious light, causing the beast to roar with affronted fury, flinching backward with a stuttering step. “With a half-forged sword and less than that of a plan?” Hunk asks incredulously. “You should’ve run!”

“No!” Keith yells back before charging forward again, sword angled up and through the tendons he’d already sliced on his first pass. 

He strikes true this time, the beast faltering as its leg gives out from underneath it, blood like molten rock pouring down from the cut. Keith manages to dodge the splatter with quick footwork while Hunk curses him for a fool. But his attack gives Hunk the edge he needs, the break in the beast’s concentration that he can use to drive it back into that half-real place of essence and elemental fire. 

“Brats,” the beast hisses at them like a thousand snakes waking from slumber. “Insolent whelps.”

“Brats who are kicking your ass,” Keith snarls back as he brings that bit of half-forged silver and steel around in a great arching strike that opens a fresh gash across the beast’s side.

Hunk uses that half-second break of the beast’s concentration—the beast turning to try to swipe at Keith’s ever-moving form—to spit a spell of ending out of his mouth, the words warping the air around him. He dives to the side as it swipes at him with claws of fire and melting metal. The beast gouges great lines in the rock above his head, and its roar rattles the very foundations of his smithy.

Hunk can feel the rage build within him. The affronted sense of incredulous insult that shrieks ‘how dare you, how dare you’ in time with his heartbeat—a steady thrum of rage and offense that this creature dare to tread upon his court, destroy his workshop, touch his people. It coils in his breast like some great venomous snake about to strike—toxic and perilous. When he drags himself to his feet again, knees shaking with the effort, all he can feel is that throb of offended fury. 

“How dare you,” he hisses like the steam from a geyser. “How dare you.”

Magic pours from him like fog from a piece of dry ice in water—thick and choking. His palm is a shrieking point of pain as words older than his entire civilization pour from his mouth. He keeps his hand pressed in front of him like a ward, like a shield, like a burning brand to drive the darkness squalling back into its hole.

And the beast does retreat from him, screaming in endless rage. Keith harries it like a hound at a bear—all lightning fast reflexes and silvered blade. Hunk presses it as implacable as any force of nature. Step by step, screaming force of will against will, they drive it back against the forge. Lazy surges over it like a cloud of ash and choking smoke, muffling the beast’s shrieks of fury and pain. 

Together they force it into the forge, into that gateway of fire and creation. “Get back,” Hunk hisses at it, full of territorial fury. “Under your rock.”

They stand together, dragging in ragged breaths, beat by stuttering heartbeat, until Hunk collapses slowly—every piece of him folding in on itself—until he sits on the floor, breath rattling through his lungs. Keith looks at Hunk, looks at Lazy, looks at the forge and then laughs, and laughs, and laughs until he chokes from the force of it.

They collapse there before the forge, a pile of shuddering breaths and shaking limbs.

It is there that Haggar finds them. Hunk flat on his back, staring at the shadowed ceiling of his forge with unblinking eyes. Keith kneeling with his palms on his knees, sword forgotten, breath coming in in ragged breaths.

Hunk doesn’t hear her come in. Doesn’t see her skirts sweep across the stones in a steady beat. Doesn’t notice her until she stands above him, snow-pale hair forming a curtain around them as she bends to study him. He doesn’t know what expression his face makes. Doesn’t know how to interpret the one stamped across her narrow features.

Eventually she smiles, sharped-toothed and vicious. “Next time, my heart,” she tells him with every semblance of gentleness. “Try to summon something a little less than a balrog, yes?”  
   
iii. Be Kind (you will be glad you were one day)

Pulling the sword out of its final tempering, Hunk studies its gleaming length, turning it to one side and then another. He grimaces slightly—the sword feels feather light in his grip, weight balanced oddly—and gives it a test swing. From the shadowed vaults of his workshop ceiling comes a faint sound, a faint rude sound. He rolls his eyes at it, lowering the sword gently.

“Get your scrawny ass down here,” he calls, tone fond despite the bite of his words.

“’m not scrawny,” Keith replies as he lands a healthy distance from the forge—Hunk worries slightly that the balrog incident may traumatized the other boy as far as the smithy is concerned. 

Hunk snorts at him. “I’m, like, twice you in every direction.”

Keith gives him an assessing look that Hunk’s not sure how to interpret. “If that were true, you’d be a lot taller.”

“So much sass,” Hunk complains jokingly. “For such a tiny body. Anyway, try this.”

Keith rolls his eyes so hard Hunk wonders briefly if they’ll get stuck that way, but he takes the sword without comment. Hunk can’t help but watch his face like hawk studying tall grass, noting the tiniest of changes. At first Keith remains his passive, solemn self, but after the first swing, the second more complicated strike, and then a series of fast, complex moves that Hunk has trouble tracking, Keith breaks out in a wondering smile.

“It’s beautiful,” he breathes as he brings the sword around again in a slow, graceful arch. The rubies set in the hilt wink in the flickering light, runes ancient and powerful glow along its length, and Hunk feels something settle in his bones as he watches this sturdy ball of rage and defiance stare at his creation like it was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen. “Whoever receives it will be overjoyed. I’ve never seen finer, not in all the courts.”

“It’s yours,” Hunk blurts out. “I mean, if you want it. It’s yours.”

Keith starts, nearly drops the blade and turns to stare at him—verbana eyes huge and disbelieving. “Mine? But, you. I mean, you can’t.”

“Why not?” Hunk asks, dumbfounded by the reaction. “It’s my smithy, my sword. I can give it to whomever I want.”

“But Haggar,” Keith protests, shaking his head without meeting Hunk’s gaze. “She would never agree to it.”

Hunk makes an amused sound. “I think she will. She said you were to be my guard, my knight-errant, right? You can’t do that without a sword, armour, whatever else you need. Besides, after the entire Balrog …mess, I think she’ll be way more inclined to agree than before.”

Keith blinks at him, stares at the sword, then back at him, and then laughs softly in disbelieving wonder. “You’ll really ask her to let me have a sword? Me?”

Hunk blinks at him, rubs a hand through the hair at the back of his neck—way longer than he has ever let it grow before—and cocks his head. “Yeah? Dude, you are some kind of amazing with a sword. It’s beyond stupid to not let you have one.” He then grins, winks, and grins some more at the flush that crawls up Keith’s neck to ride his cheekbones. “Besides, I like the idea of having my own pint-sized bodyguard. And you can’t be that and unarmed.”

Keith turns an immediate and alarming shade of red, making Hunk seriously worry for a moment that he’d managed to break him. Keith opens his mouth and then closes it a couple of times, as if stumbling over the words he wants to use—or maybe just not finding them at all. But Hunk has already figured out that Keith is not the best with social interaction, words seem to elude him more than half the time. He watches, more than a little amused, as Keith settles on petulant—shooting him a pouty glare. “I’m not pint-sized.”

Hunk reaches out and ruffles his hair. “Teeny-tiny,” he teases.

///

Hunk can spot the moment when Keith finally, finally, acclimates—when the days stretch and bleed and merge into something like a routine for him. It doesn’t sneak up on Keith the way that it did for him. It isn’t a slow development of days upon days until they all faded into a muted pattern of eat-sleep-work, but a sudden burst of realization. Adaptation, acceptance, comes to Keith the way a period comes to a sentence.

They sit at a table conjured out of want and will, filled with random smattering of foods from every cuisine, and the conversation flows between them as smooth and easy as Kaukonahua on good day. He can see the moment that Keith realizes he’s comfortable in this space, in this company—it’s a jerk across the shoulders, a sudden dilation of the pupils until there’s nothing but the thinnest hint of verbena around them, it’s a spasm of a hand into a fist and then forced flat again.

“You okay over there?” He asks even though he knows he’ll get a lie as easy as breathing in return.

Keith nods too quick to be truthful. “Yeah. ‘fcourse.”

Hunk cocks his head to one side, feels his hair slide across his shoulders in a heavy wave, and studies Keith for so long the other boy squirms minutely under his scrutiny. He considers pushing, but the desperate and despairing cast to Keith’s features has him biting his tongue. “All right then,” he says, pushing away from the table with a shriek of wooden chair legs across stone. “Come find me when you get bored. I’ve got a thing to test on you.”

Keith shoots him look from under his lashes that is one-part skepticism and two parts snark. “Should we call Haggar then?”

Hunk makes a move to swat him, which Keith dodges easily—rearing back in his chair and laughing—and glowers. “Be careful saying things like that. She just might show up.”

Keith pales so fast Hunk worries that he might faint from all the blood draining from his head. His eyes dart to the great doors and their heavy frame, a line forming deep between his eyes. “Has she done that?”

“Not yet,” Hunk says with a shrug. “But seems like testing fate to just toss her name about like that.”

Keith chews on his lip, nods jerkily, and slides to his feet in one of those liquid moves that makes Hunk wonder if he’s got elastic where his bones ought to be. He reaches for his sword—movements still reverent and wondering each time he touches it—and slides into the shadows of the smithy.

Hunk lets him go. He’s learned that Keith is more than a little like a stray cat—best to let him come to you and otherwise make no sudden movements. He makes a short, sharp hand gesture—the table folding itself out of existence—and then stands there for a moment with his hands on his hips, thoughtful. He half expects Haggar to come sauntering through the door, some new diagram or plan or demand in her hands, on her lips, but the doors remain stubbornly closed.

He sighs, refuses to investigate why her absence obliquely disappoints him, and turns back to his forge. He can hear Keith high above him, as secretive as any cat, and smile quirks his lips. Making random toys for Keith seems as good as any distraction from the odd ache gathering around his heart.

///

Hunk is deep in thought, entirely focused upon his project—forging a set of light weight but fire-resistant armour for Keith—when Haggar graces them with her presence, and fails to hear the great double doors swing open, the slithering slide of Haggar’s skirts across the stone, or Keith’s muted, terrorized gasp. He readjusts his leather apron, scowls at the set of greaves that refuse—for reasons that continue to elude him—to set properly. Hammering out the runes he’d previously etched, something gone wrong in their original construction, he mutters to himself—half obscenities, half plans to correct his errors. He’s proud of himself when he doesn’t jump or jerk at the first feather-light touch of fingers across his brow, through his hair.

And if he faintly leans into the touch—well, no one who knows will breathe a word. 

“You called, noble heart?” Haggar breathes against the shell of his ear. He shudders and he can hear Keith move in the high darkness above his forge.

Hunk’s brain shorts out for a long moment even though he can hear Keith’s angry movements above him, feel Haggar turn to face where he lurks in the shadows, languid and lazy, and knows nothing good of that confrontation could possibly come. Haggar keeps one corpse-pale hand in his hair, lightly dragging nails through the hair at the base of his skull—a soothing, up-down glide of gentle talons sharp enough to peel his scalp straight off. It’s an unending threat of violence that he’s slowly, terrifyingly, growing accustomed to—like one might adapt to a regional accent.

It’s hard to think around the gentle sweeps of glacial-cold fingers through his hair, carding the sweaty strands this way and that, but Hunk tries. For Keith’s sake, possibly for his own, he tries to wrestle his brain back into working order.

“I have a question,” he manages, winces at the breathiness of his voice.

“I might provide an answer,” she purrs, and while her hand continues its lazy pass through his hair as if petting a particularly fluffy cat, Haggar doesn’t turn back to him. Her eyes remain fixed on the high recesses of the smithy’s vaulted ceilings. And Hunk knows Keith is up there in those shadows staring right back down at her.

“You said you were giving me Keith as a gift, yes?” He asks carefully, feeling his way through the words as if they were a labyrinth of thorns.

“Oh,” she sighs, her amusement vast and condescending. “You learned its name. You are gentle, noble heart. But yes. A gift freely offered, freely given.”

Hunk blows out a shuddering breath, because he had not been certain of that until she said the words. “But he wears your mark.”

“As you do, artificer,” she replies and under that contented tone winds a warning. Her fingers curl into a loose fist within his hair.

“I do,” he nods, ignoring on how her grip on his hair pulls and tugs. “But because he is my gift from you, shouldn’t he wear my mark?”

At that simple (desperately not-simple) question she turns, her glowing eyes wide with delight, delicate tips of her yellowed fangs showing in her wide smile. “My heart, my noble heart. Do I understand you right? You wish for him to wear, your mark—to walk these halls with your seal on his body?”

Hunk ignores the strangled sound that erupts from the shadows of the ceiling. Ignores Haggar’s delighted, conspirator’s smile. Focuses on the task at hand. “I do.”

Haggar fakes a pout at him—midnight eyelashes fluttering across her pale cheeks. (he doesn’t want to think about how he knows it’s a fake pout; how he is certain beyond death that she is playing games) “And what if I do not wish this? What if I wish for everyone to know that he belongs to me still?”

The silence from the rafters takes a despairing note, and Hunk squares his shoulders against it. His lips curl in an exasperated smile. (he’s playing the game. just a game, nothing more) “My lady,” he sighs, as if they had had this argument a hundred times, a thousand. “These emerald and silver halls are yours, as is everything contained within them. No one doubts it. Allow me this.”

Her hands sweep to cradle his face—soft and fond—and she leans into him. Hunk stares back at her as she studies him, a soft line forming on her brow, wrinkles crinkling tiny and vulnerable at the edges of her eyes. “And why should I allow this,” she whispers, so close her breath—too sweet and cloying—ghosts over his lips. “Tell me this, my heart.”

“Because he is your gift to me, and all who looks upon him should know it,” he answers as soft as she. 

Haggar pulls back from him, holding him caught between her palms at arm’s length. Once her touch would have made him tremble and shudder in terror. Now he stands still and patient in her grasp, waiting her decision. The human ability to adapt is a wondrous thing.

“You are getting better at this,” she sighs and something like a kissing-cousin to defeat rests on her features. She lets her hands drop, arms swinging a little with the force of gravity. “I will allow it.”

He smiles at her, careful to keep any edge of victory from it. “Thank you,” he says, soft and sincere. “My lady.”

She heaves another sigh before sliding into an elaborate chair Hunk summons the moment her knees begin to bend. She quirks a high, arching brow at him. “I allow you many privileges, artificer.”

“And I have made everything you have asked of me,” he replies easily as he turns back to his forge, mind alight with designs and ideas for Keith’s mark.

He can hear her shift on her chair behind him, irritable and cranky with the way this truth leaves her no room to prod at him. “You have,” she accedes grudgingly, as petulant as any toddler. “As is right by the bounds of our agreement.”

Hunk hums low in his throat. “I have a wonder about that, my lady.”

“A wonder?” She repeats, amused and affectionate. “Tell me this wonder.”

“How am I to search for Lance in the confines of my workshops?” He asks simply and without adornment. Either she’ll kill him for the question or she’ll laugh and he’s no way of knowing which, so he asks. There’s a soft, fragile sound from the shadows of the ceiling—like a breath caught between a gasp and a sob.

Haggar laughs, high and sweet as any maid’s. “You can’t, noble heart.”

He nods, presumably caught up in thoughts of creation but alive to her every breath and movement—as sensitive to the shifts in her temper as a weather vane to an oncoming hurricane. “May I ask, then, permission to leave my workshops?”

Her laughter sounds as if it were ripped from her—surprised and sudden. He turns, eyebrows arching, to find her curled in her chair cackling, long white hair spilling over the arms of the chair, across her face, sweeping the stone floor. “You have always been able to leave.”

“I, but,” Hunk blinks at her, feels as if the stone floor had suddenly turned to liquid—unsteady and rolling under his feet. “The doors lock from the outside.”

Haggar wipes tears from the corners of her eyes with delicate fingers. “At first, perhaps. Ah, my heart—foolish and simple,” she sighs. “Am I not sworn to not impede your search by neither word, nor deed, nor subtle plot? I cannot raise my hand against you, nor another’s on my behalf?”

“I,” he stares at her and feels very stupid. “Yes.”

She folds her arms over the armrests of the chair and rests her cheek upon them, rolls her eyes to look up at him under her dark lashes. “Ah my heart, I had wondered why you refused to walk my halls, see the glories of my realm. I never thought to imagine the reason to be so foolish!”

All he can do is stare at her feeling very small, and young, and more than a little stupid. “I thought I couldn’t leave?”

“You were too afraid to leave, my heart,” she corrects gently, the truth of her statement a dagger between his ribs. “You never tried to test your bounds.”

Hunk shrugs as he cannot find fault with her words. Haggar never, he realizes with a terrible start, lies to him—always prefers the brutal and brutalizing truth. “Well,” he says, voice cracks to pieces and he rolls his shoulders to push the ache away. “Well, now I am.”

Haggar hums low in her throat. “Are you?” She muses, and he has the oddest impression that she isn’t talking to him. She lolls her head in her arms as if too tired to be bothered to raise it. “I suppose you are, in your deliberate manner. Ah, well, I do not hate that about you.”

“If I can—uh.” He stutters, stops, dries to drag his thoughts into logical sequence and finds himself staring down into her school bus yellow eyes. She quirks one immaculately sculpted brow at him, smile tugging terrible and viscous at the corners of her lips. “If I can leave my workshop, can I go wherever I like?”

“You have free reign across the width and breadth of my domain,” she replies easily. “No door shall bar your path, no hand be raised against you, no word spoken against your quest to find your love and bring him home—should he wish to return.”

Something in her phrasing makes him frown, alarms ringing inside his head, but he cannot place why. “Why didn’t you tell me I could leave earlier?” He asks, not expecting an answer. “If you wanted me to see your realm?”

Haggar slowly extends the arm under her cheek to study her glossy black nails and smiles slow and sweet at him. “I have no responsibility to be your minder. What have I to gain to remind you of a thing that might hasten your departure from my halls?”

“True,” Hunk laughs softly—laughs at himself, at the situation, at the way his heart implodes inside his chest like a dying star. “That was not part of our bargain.”

Haggar slides to her feet with the softest whisper of her robes across the stones and smooths her blizzard-and-ice hands over his arms, up his shoulders, his neck, to cup his face between her palms. Her smile is a knife-slice of pain and something that looks almost like regret. “I am honor bound to not hinder you, artificer, but I will not help you,” she says with the gentleness of ice-water filling frozen lungs. When she releases him, he almost staggers, catching himself on muscle memory and heartache. “Make your toy his mark and then come see my halls, my heart. This time I will await you.”

The silence that fills the smithy in her absence, rushing into the void made by her departure, chokes him with the sudden press of realization. Hunk knows—he knows—that he has to leave the stone walls of his bower and the safety of his forge, assurity of place and purpose. He’d already come to that decision on his own. But hearing the words from Haggar’s lips takes that decision and warps it into insecurity and doubt. 

Hunk almost doesn’t realize it when he’s sunk his hands into his hair, pulling it tight at the roots. Bracketing his face with his arms, he fights to wrestle his breathing into something steady and even—anything other than the jagged, irregular rasp that tears out of his throat like it could be a scream if he’d let it.

Hunk doesn’t know how he’ll make himself step out of those doors. They’d become a barrier against the insanity his life had become. Every scrap of courage he’d had, he’s used just coming to this place, and now she’s demanding that find some left over remnant and walk himself through those halls and to her seat of power. 

He swallows hard at the thought. The image of Haggar on a throne, a diaz, some symbol of her power in her hands—perhaps the scepter he’d made days (weeks? Months?) ago because she’d said she’d dreamed it—a crown of ice and shadow on her brow, punches the air out of his lungs. The idea of walking through the throng of her people to stand before her in that space overwhelms him with terror and a dangerous longing he can’t bear to consider for long.

And what if he finds Lance in that glittering crowd? What if he doesn’t?

Hunk tightens his grip, forearms pressing hard against his temples, elbows nearly touching. He tries to count his breath—force it into something with a rhythm—but all he succeeds in doing is forcing out a hiccupping sob.

Fingers pluck at his sleeves, find his chin where it dips down against his chest, smooth against his cheeks. For a moment he has a wild thought that Haggar has returned to find him in the middle of a breakdown and despairs, until he realizes the touch is warm, tips of the fingers callused and rough. He lets those rough and gentle fingers pry his hands from his hair, pull his arms down, wrap around his wrists in a steady and steadying grip.

When Hunk forces his eyes open, breath still a jagged and wild thing in his throat, he finds Keith staring back at him, worry and fear and the beginnings of a directionless rage brewing in his eyes.

He lets Keith lead him to the chair he’d called up for Haggar. Lets Keith manhandle him into sitting, slumped and exhausted, into its massive form. Lets Keith push and prod him until he rests against it, head back and throat exposed. Lets Keith take one of his hands and place it against Keith’s chest where he can feel that furious heartbeat as sure and steady as the sunrise he’s forgotten. 

“Can you breathe with me?” Keith asks, voice velvet soft. “Just two in,” Hunk breathes in time with the rise of Keith’s chest. “And three out.” Hunk exhales in time with that quiet voice, the movement of the breast beneath his hands. “And again.”

How long they stay there—Hunk sprawled in the pseudo-throne he’d called up for Haggar, Keith standing between his legs with his hand clutched between two of Keith’s and pressed to Keith’s chest—just breathing in and out, Hunk doesn’t know. But eventually, with the slowness of snow melting on a mountain side, his breathing evens out—stops being a punched out, desperate rasp. 

“Sorry,” he whispers.

“Don’t,” comes the equally quiet reply. “She’s awful, and she’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”

At that, Hunk laughs—small and shattered—wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and doesn’t move his head from where it lays resting against the back of the chair, throne, with his chin tilted up, throat bared. “It is though,” he says over Keith’s protesting noises. “I chose this. I made the deal.”

Keith snorts. “Their deals are always lies.”

“Haggar never lies,” Hunk replies, letting gravity pull his chin back down, rolls his head to the side and looks at Keith where he stands between his legs, his hand still caught in both of Keith’s. “It would be easier if she did.”

“She doesn’t tell the truth either,” Keith argues, grips his hand harder until Hunk can feel the bite of his finger nails. “She’s not honest.”

Hunk sighs, feels it rattle through his chest like it would shake his ribs lose, and looks at Keith for a long moment. Keith is honest, he thinks. Honest the way a wolf is honest. A storm. A flash of prairie fire. Honest because he doesn’t know any other way to be. Lies are an affront to his very being. Something in that realization wraps around his heart and squeezes like a vice. “No,” he agrees. “She’s not honest.”

She’d laugh at them both for even caring. She wouldn’t even understand why they cared. Not really. Hunk closes his eyes against that thought. Tries to find the right way up inside his head. 

The hands on his wrist tighten again, begin to let go, and Hunk twists his hand around and catches one in an easy grip. Let’s his head fall back against the chair again, closes his eyes against all the things he doesn’t understand and emotions he doesn’t want to think about. Tries to find it in himself to be kind. 

“I’m not honest, either,” he confesses, voice barely a whisper of sound. Keith goes very still in his grasp, breathing the type of even that only comes with serious willpower. “I’m scared. I’m terrified of this place, of her, of myself. And I’m not honest either.”

“Are you scared of me?” Keith asks, moves his hand so their fingers slot together in a tangle. 

Hunk doesn’t open his eyes, just rolls his head back and forth along the back of the chair. “No,” he sighs. “I’m not scared of you.” He cracks his eyes open, peers at Keith in all his solemn glory. “You might be the only thing in this place that I’m not scared of.”

Keith swallows hard, eyes sliding away from Hunk’s, refusing to hold his gaze. Despite his sudden shyness he doesn’t let go of Hunk’s hand. He gives a little nod, as if confirming something to himself. “I’m not afraid of you either.”

Hunk snorts softly, amused at the very notion. “Dude, it’s not like I make the most frightening of figures.”

“You could,” Keith says softly. “If you were a little different, you could.”

Hunk tugs on Keith’s hand until he finally looks at him. “I’m an enormous terrified, anxious mess,” he says without bitterness—just fact. He’s come to accept his base state of being a long time ago. “That’s not scary.”

Keith cocks his head to the side, eyes narrowing, hair falling across his face. “Maybe, but you don’t let it slow you down. You don’t let it control you.”

“Did you miss the big meltdown not but, what, a couple of minutes ago?” Hunk asks, amused in spite of himself. 

“And now you’re talking your way through it,” Keith counters fiercely. “You get scared, yeah, but then you deal with it. Isn’t that, like, the definition of bravery?”

“I guess?” Hunk replies, bemused. He’s not sure where intensity is coming from, but he can’t argue with Keith when his shoulders are set, mouth a determined line. It’s hard to argue with Keith when he’s full of a type of furious sincerity that could burn him to cinders. Hard to disagree as Keith glowers down at him, legs bracketed by Hunk’s thighs, standing there like there’s nowhere else he belongs. 

And there’s a dangerous thought in a long, long line of dangerous thoughts.

Hunk lets his head hit the back of the chair with a heavy sound. He tugs Keith’s hand where it’s slotted with his, a little jerk just to feel how their fingers tangle together. “Tell me why you are here,” he asks without looking. “How did they get you?”

“Why should I tell you?” Keith asks, and the tone is calm—teasing where it should have been sharp and defensive. 

Hunk keeps his head against the back of the chair, staring up at the ceiling, body an inelegant sprawl in the chair. He feels a rueful smile twist his mouth. “Come on,” he urges. “You’ve heard my sad origin story.”

That gets him a laugh. “Part of it at least.”

“The important bit,” Hunk confirms. “Not that my story is terribly unusual in this place. Chasing a lost love, desperate, makes a questionable deal, you know the rest.”

Keith’s thumb moves over the back of his knuckles tentatively, a small gesture of comfort. “Not that unusual, no.”

“You’re holding out,” Hunk chides quietly. He likes the gentle, intimate atmosphere that’s built around them. Like sharing secrets after lights out.

Keith huffs out a breath, fidgets minutely—Hunk can feel him shift side to side between his thighs—and then sighs. “Story pretty much like yours,” he says. “But Shiro. I don’t know. We,” Keith sucks in a breath, holds it for a long beat, and then blows it out hard. “We were, I don’t know—friends.” Keith pauses and waves his free hand in the air before dragging it through his hair.

“There was tension you didn’t know what to do with?” Hunk says, and Keith looks at him, eyebrows crooked, mouth twisted into a pained smile. He nods.

“Maybe we could’ve been something, bu— But then.” Keith stutters, chokes, looks down hard at their joined hands. 

Hunk lifts his head with monumental effort, locks eyes with Keith where he fidgets in front of him. “But then the fae and all their bullshit?”

Keith startles, blinks impossibly pretty eyes at him, and laughs. “Yeah.”

Hunk sighs and turns over their joined hands—twisting them from one side to another—just to look at the difference in skin tone, see how Keith’s hand manages to look tiny and delicate in his even though he knows crazy amount of strength contained in that compact body. Keith lets him inspect their hands without comment, for all appearances perfectly content to stand there and let Hunk fiddle with his hands like he would a misbehaving bit of armour. 

“So you are still looking for him?” Hunk asks, not looking at Keith, giving him some space. He knows how hard this particular conversation can be.

Keith doesn’t say anything, just breathes in, breathes out, keeps his body silent and still. “Yeah. When I can.”

Hunk nods, distant and thoughtful. “We both have work to do, then. You and I.”

“I guess?” Keith replies, confusion lacing his tone like ivy up lattice work. 

Hunk tugs on their joined hands, yanking Keith minutely towards him and quirks an eyebrow when that gets him a glare. “You guess?”

“You don’t have to look for Shiro with me,” Keith says, but his lips quirk with what wants to be smile. “It’s not your responsibility.”

Hunk hums in the back of his throat. Then flashes a grin up at Keith. “I have an offer.”

“Uh-oh,” Keith mutters. “I’ve learned about deals here.”

Hunk yanks on his hands again, fingers tightening just enough to make Keith squirm. “You hush,” he scolds lightly. “But I have an offer, if you want to hear it.”

He gets a long, considering look and now it’s his turn to squirm under that serious and solemn gaze. “I think this is a bad idea,” Keith comments lightly. “But okay.”

“I swear I will help you find Shiro, if you help me find Lance,” Hunk says and Keith sucks in a hard breath, his eyes widening. “And I swear I will never lie to you, if you are honest with me.”

Keith tilts his head, skepticism and distrust write across his features like a brand. Hunk tries not take it personally. These halls, the courts of the fae, do not engender trust and fellow feeling. Hunk can almost feel the sigh rattle from Keith’s toes out his mouth. “I swear.”

Hunk laughs at him, swings their joined hands. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

He gets a sharp look and a curled lip in return. “I swear,” Keith says. “That I will help you find Lance, if you help me find Shiro. And I will be honest with you, if you never lie to me.”

Hunk shivers a little as those words spill between them. The sudden silence seems to grab the words, turning the phrases over like gems in a polisher, shake them for their weight, and leave them ringing like bells. They both swallow hard as they stare at each other. “Okay,” Hunk says slowly. “That’ll do it.”

///

They don’t talk afterwards. The silence follows them like hounds after a fox—pressing and vicious—but words continue to fail them. Hunk catches Keith looking at him, mouth poised at the edge of a question before he shakes his head and swallows it. He wonders if Keith catches him doing the same. 

The questions swirl around his head like vortex, sucking any other train of thought into the void. 

Do you mean it?

Is this too much?

Am I too much?

Do you mean it?

But he doesn’t ask. As often as he catches himself, he swallows the questions back down like bile, like the bitterest pill. Hunk’d rather cut out his own tongue than ask. Asking would carry with it a million consequences. Asking would mean getting an answer. So Hunk swallows his questions, keeps his pride, and moves on.

Do you mean it?

Keith follows him like a second shadow—following him from workshop to workshop, hovering on the edges of his vision like a ghost. Until Hunk is almost ready to climb out of his skin from the tension. The questions that press against his mouth, begging to be asked. The terror of knowing pressing against his heart, demanding that he remain silent. The indecision that rips his will to tattered shreds. All these things come together to make the situation unbearable, untenable.

He’s about to shout from the tension when Keith catches the edge of his sleeve and leads him away from the forge.

“You need to stop,” he says, somber and serious. 

Hunk blinks at him and Keith cocks his head with a little half smile, points to Hunk’s sleeve, which smolders slightly. Hunk blinks at it. “Huh.”

“Yeah,” Keith agrees. “I think you are done for today.”

Hunk turns his arm over, trying to remember when he’d managed to catch himself on fire. It was a hazard, of course, when working the forge, but he normally remembered things like that. He undoes the heavy leather apron with numb fingers, lets it slide off his shoulders. Keith catches it before it falls to the floor with a faint huff of breath.

“Shirt’s ruined,” Hunk mumbles, and this upsets him more than he can understand. It’s the shirt he’d worn when Haggar had led him down, down, down the sithen’s stone steps, through the forest of frost and moss, through her halls of silver and emerald. He fingers the burned and ruined fabric. Heaves a sigh he can feel start at the base of his diaphragm, rattle through his throat, expel out his mouth in a great burst. He grabs the edge of his shirt and yanks the entire thing over his head in one movement. Stares at it for a moment, throat working around words that won’t come. Then in a burst of movement so fast Keith doesn’t even have time to startle, throws it in the forge.

They stand there watching the flame curl around the fabric, sputtering and smoking, both in a daze. Lazy sulks at the edges of the forge, refusing to touch the fabric.

“Well,” Keith says, dragging out the vowel of the word, hands clenching around Hunk’s leather apron. “That was dramatic.”

Hunk’s sense of time breaks down around that event. For one long breath, he’s staring at his forge, the burning shirt, Lazy’s sulking form, and then he’s being led by gentle hands out of the smithy. 

Keith catches his wrist in two hands, drags him along, ignoring Hunk’s protests that he needs to work—he has so much work, diagrams piling up, projects upon projects—that he can sleep later. But Keith is boy made of defiance, rage, and determination, and he ignores every protest, every argument, every half-formed disagreement without even a backward glance.

Hunk could stop him—he knows this like he knows the equations to produce system balance in a mechanical design—it would be relatively trivial to shift his weight, draw back heavy and firm on his heels, and drag that boy of furious desperation to a stop. But he doesn’t because whatever burst of emotion had fueled him has run dry and left him stuttering like an engine without oil—all parts of grinding to a broken stop.

He lets himself be manhandled, dragged about, and fussed at. Keith alternates between gentle and scolding as he turns down the bed, checks Hunk for more burns—finds them and rants as he applies a salve produced from gods-only-know-where—and shoves Hunk towards the bed. Hunk stutters, mind shorting out harder than it already had, when Keith kneels and undoes one heavy boot and then the other.

“I can do that,” Hunk protests, reaching for the laces.

Keith smacks his hands away, scowling. “You can barely string two words together and have set yourself on fire three times in the last half hour. At this rate, you’ll end up strangling yourself.”

Hunk blinks at the vehemence in Keith’s tone. “I’m not that bad.”

“Right now, yes you are,” Keith snaps. Hunk closes his eyes, rakes a hand through his hair, and can’t find it in him to argue with the bare truth of Keith’s words. But he can’t rest yet. Rest means sleeping. Sleeping means dreams. Dreams mean voices and memories and the whispers of things left undone, words left unsaid, promises that he should have made. Sleeping gives his subconscious the opportunity to rise massive and merciless to drown him in all his regrets. 

“Hey.” Hunk startles at Keith’s gentle touch on his wrist. From one breath, one little mental breakdown, to the next Keith had clambered upon the bed, heedless of his boots on the furs. “Easy, just breath.”

“Your boots are on the bed,” Hunk tells him dumbly. For some reason this seems critically important. The rest of the world could be burning, the courts of light and chaos falling to pieces, and Hunk would not care beyond the fact that Keith has his boots on while kneeling in Hunk’s bed. He frowns at Keith. “Your boots are on the bed.”

“Okay, that’s a thing you can focus on,” Keith tells him with a bemused little smile tugging on the corners of his mouth. Hunk continues to frown at him, and then time starts moving oddly for him. 

One moment he’s sitting on the bed, upset about the boots, and in the next he’s settled back in the pillows.

Body going soft and slack as a gentle hand cards through his hair.

Darkness creeping in the corners of his vision, eyelids heavy as if weighted with stones, breathing slowing to a steady rhythm. 

Complains, briefly—voice a sandpaper rasp of a whisper—that he has work. Armours to make, swords to forge, rings wondrous and clever to craft.

He’s hushed soft and fond, fingers pressed against his lips, and he falls silent. 

Near-silence fills his workshops, nothing more than the steady hiss of the forge going cold, his own breath going slow and even. 

And in between one thought and the next he’s asleep.

///

Hunk comes back to the waking world but slowly, senses turning on one by one like mission check before launch. Becomes aware of the heavy press of furs upon his body, the feeling of silk and velvet against his skin, the rasp of his pants where he forgot to remove them the night before. Hears the furs move—soft and heavy—around him as he shifts slowly, his body a solid line of aches, and the small sounds of his workshops shifting around him—reorganizing themselves in accordance to his plans for the day. And when he opens his eyes he’s surprised, distantly, to find himself alone—the odd liminal space his bed occupies empty of any other being but himself. 

He drags himself upright, hissing at the burns along his arms that make themselves known—soft flesh tugging at newly formed scabs, tender and pink. And takes stock in his tattered form. 

Burns litter his arms, old and new, and he knows he’ll have a whole host of new scars—shiny and round where the coals have spattered and stuck when he worked the forge carelessly. Hunk sighs to himself as he traces them. He is too often thoughtless, he realizes, when wrapped in his projects and dark thoughts. 

He slides out of bed, grumbling when his feet hit icy stone—wonders briefly about the possibility of geo-thermal floor warming, plans filling his head as easily as water in a bowl—and reaches for his shirt.

Hunk’s hand wavers in the air, as if suddenly running into an invisible wall, when he realizes what he’s reaching for no longer exists. Destroyed by his own carelessness and clumsy hands. He chews on his bottom lip for a brief moment—tastes the iron tang of blood when he bites down too hard—and then blows out a hard breath.

He can be morose, he decides, or he can choose to move on.

He moves on.

Placing his right hand against the wall, silvered brand pulsing with his own heartbeat, he mouths syllables alien and terrible—thinks of the old stories of Beauty and the Beast and her wardrobe the provided whatever was necessary.

The stone wall peels back like the flesh of an overripe fruit to reveal an explosion of silks, leather and velvet done in midnight black and gleaming silver. Haggar’s colours. He flicks through shirt after shirt, discarding more than he’d ever think to buy in a year, frustration mounting at each discarded garment.

“Have you ever heard of colour,” he snarls at it, feels the magic shiver around him, press down in disapproving silence. “I look good in yellow,” he snipes, channels Lance and his endless prima donna tendencies. “I’m not wearing any of this. At least give me something in green.”

There’s no sound from his newly formed wardrobe, but if a bit of silence and magic could sigh he imagines it would have heaved the greatest sigh known to man. At the very back, hidden by shirts and doublets and rich vests done in every manner of luxurious fabric, hangs a sad, barren shirt in simple green.

Hunk grabs it. Grumbles. Tugs it over his head as he marches towards his workshop. Save him, he thinks petulantly at any deity that might be listening, from magic with aspirations of fashion.

He’s still grumbling as he makes his way to his forge, feet moving on autopilot, mind already full of plans and designs for armour built for a sturdy, agile form, when he trips over that same form.

Hunk stares down at Keith, who glowers back up at him, sleep-rumpled and cranky in his nest of furs stolen from Hunk’s own bed.

“Why are you on the floor,” he asks, his lips forming the question before his brain can successfully come online and make sense of the scene before him. The pile before the forge are a veritable heap of soft ermine and heavy bear fur—tanned and cured to be a delight against the skin and a barrier against the cold. They were not, however, intended for floor use.

Keith rolls his eyes expressively and pulls himself into a sitting position that would be awkward on any other human—but he looks as shameless as any cat half-naked with his hair sticking up at odd angles as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. “Because it’s the only way to make sure you don’t try to set yourself on fire.”

Hunk frowns, pulls back in affronted dignity. “I don’t try to set myself on fire.”

“And yet,” Keith says with a massive yawn that makes Hunk’s own jaw ache in sympathetic pain just watching it. “You always manage to succeed.”

There’s no good way to argue with that, so Hunk doesn’t try. Just rolls his eyes, prods Keith with one foot, and jerks his thumb towards the darkened arch that leads towards the bed and bathing chambers. “Go to your actual bed, smart ass.”

Keith stretches, languid and lazy, and blinks at him. “This is my bed.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hunk grumbles and prods him again getting an irritated grunt in return. “Point made, you needed to protect me from myself and now you don’t so go back to your actual bed.”

“This is my bed, actually,” Keith retorts. 

“What,” Hunk says flatly. 

Keith hauls himself out of his nest, rubbing one hand through his messy hair before scrounging around for his shirt. “Normally I set it up in front of the main doors, in the rafters, so I can see anyone coming in.”

Hunk rubs at the bridge of his nose, trying to head off the sweep of pressure that threatens to turn itself into a migraine. “You. What.”

“Someone has to keep watch while you sleep,” Keith responds, slightly muffled as he pulls on a shirt—struggling a little to get settled. Hunk sighs, catches the back of Keith’s neck and pulls him around to adjust the loose tunic where it hangs unevenly.

“The workshops are attuned to me,” he says while he brushes flat the creases in Keith’s clothes. “No one can come in or out—except Haggar—without me knowing it.”

“Oh,” Keith says quietly, all parts of him gone oddly pliant and awkward under Hunk’s ministrations.

Hunk studies him, eyes gone narrow and thoughtful. “So you mean to tell me you’ve been sleeping on the floor this entire time?”

Keith squirms minutely under his gaze, shrugging one shoulder as he keeps his gaze resolutely on the floor—as if by refusing to meet Hunk’s eyes he can avoid the entire conversation. “Not the floor.”

“Keith,” Hunk sighs, scrubs his hands over his face, because this boy. This ridiculous boy. “Please don’t make me ask where you’ve been sleeping.”

That gets him a lightning fast grin—spreading across Keith’s face sudden and sly and gone as soon as Hunk starts to narrow his eyes. “Okay,” Keith agrees easily. “I won’t make you ask. I mean, you can always just drop it.”

“ _Keith_.” Hunk says—reprimand and exasperation thick in his tone. He’s rewarded with a faintly chagrinned look, head cocked, and lips curled around the edge of a secret smile.

“I haven’t been sleeping on the floor,” Keith finally answers, amusement lacing his tone in a way that Hunk distrusts. He can sense the joke and knows in his bones that he is the butt of it. “I’ve been sleeping in the rafters.”

“Godsdammit,” Hunk sighs as Keith laughs, soft and low. “That’s not better, and you know it.”

Keith shrugs, easy and comfortable, and Hunk wonders at it, just a little. The way that Keith shifts between moods, he has an easier time charting the currents of Haggar’s temper than he does Keith’s. Hunk wonders, uncomfortably, what that says about him. “Not all of us can call up our whims out of nothing but shadow and magic,” Keith points out, his tone not exactly bitter, but still holding a baffled edge of tension. “Not all of us walk these halls as near-lords.”

Hunk frowns at him. “The workshops will provide you anything you want.”

“No,” Keith corrects, gentle and unkind. “The workshops provide _you_ with all your heart desires.” He pauses for a moment, shifts to the side in studied casualness. “Well, all but one.”

Hunk huffs a breath at him, chooses to ignore the minute jab and its undercurrents that he can only begin to guess at, and rolls his eyes. “You should have said something.”

“And what would I have said?” Keith asks, head cocked and eyes brightly amused. “How should I have asked?”

Hunk makes a rude sound at him and a ruder gesture. “Now you are being difficult.” He turns on one heel and starts for the odd, liminal space of the workshops that make up the living chambers. Makes a little ‘come here’ gesture over one shoulder. “Come along. We’re getting this fixed.”

He can feel Keith’s confusion without bothering to turn to look at him. Feels him trot along behind him just out of sight. Feels his unease and nervousness as he follows Hunk into the soft darkness that shivers and breathes around them like a living thing. Hunk realizes in that moment that Keith has never seen him make demands of this odd, semi-sentient space they occupy. Had never thought to make demands himself and test the limits of his own command. 

Hunk strides through the shadows, raises one hand sure and lazy, and with a flicking motion of his right fingers lights spring to life along walls like tiny stars erupting from gas and dust. Keith’s little gasp makes him smile, slow and easy, entertained at how much a simple bit of magic seemed to surprise and rattle him.

“It’s a matter of will,” he says over his shoulder, light and dismissive. “This place has a will of its own, but it wants to be helpful as long as you are firm.”

Hunk holds out his right hand, palm to the sleek black wall shot through with silver and gold veins and pushes his hand against it, slowly flattening his fingers through stone until it shivers and bows inward around him, curving slowly in like a collapsing vein. A faint, slithering sound fills the air as Hunk forces the wall to blister, shudder, and then burst like a bubble popping, air rushing past them as the wall rolls backward like a wave to reveal a new room, an empty space waiting to be filled. To be given purpose. 

He flicks a look over his shoulder, grins with his head cocked to the side, hair sliding down his shoulders. “Just be insistent in your demands and it’ll do what you want.”

Keith blinks at him, eyes gone wide and round, mouth slack in startled disbelief. “I don’t think it works that way for everyone.”

“No?” Hunk says, shrugs, makes a simple arcane symbol over the bare floor before pulling his hand gently upward. The floor roiling with the gesture, a low stone dais emerging from the floor at his call. “Have you tried?”

“I don’t have a silver, glowing crest in my hand,” Keith retorts and Hunk knows he’d been trying for snide, but his tone catches itself somewhere on the far side of horrified instead. 

Hunk hums low in his throat at that, distracted and distant as he calls to the magic and shadows that live within his workshop. They rise—ever eager, ever insistent—coiling just out of reach in a dance of demand and cajoling. Lance, he thinks to himself idly, would be very good at this. 

The bed forms itself out shadow and flickering magic—wrapping darkness and wishes into dark wood and heavy fur. Hunk drops his hand, pleased and satisfied, as it stands in the middle of the room, majestic and rich with heavy blankets and plush pillows done in gold and crimson. “Thank you,” he says to the waiting silence. Politeness, always, in this place of wishing and wanting. “Thank you.”

He waves one hand to the bed as it stands on its stone dais, inviting and comfortable. “There,” he says with the heavy satisfaction of a project well completed. “No more sleeping on the floor with stolen furs.”

Keith stares at him, mouth working soundless, before he swallows hard and shakes his head as if trying to shake himself from a dream. “This is for me?”

Hunk crosses his arms over his chest and cocks his head. “Who else would it be for?”

“It’s … it’s too much,” Keith protests, voice tiny and overwhelmed.

“Too much what?” Hunk asks, brow furrowing. “The colour can be changed if you prefer something else. Or the covering, if fur bothers you.”

Keith stares at him a heartbeat longer, laughs faintly, and then steps up the dais to finger the silk sheets and run a hand over the dense bear fur. His touch light and wondering. “But, but why would you?”

Hunk snorts a breath through his nose, inelegant and faintly peeved. “I can’t have you sleeping on the floor like a stray cat. Be reasonable.”

“Be _reasonable_ he says,” Keith repeats in that faint, wondering tone. “Do you even know the concept, I wonder?”

Hunk makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “I’m not the one sleeping on the floor in front of the door,” he snipes. “I sleep in a proper bed.”

Keith turns, hands still buried in the furs and looks at him with his pretty eyes huge, pupils blown in something like shock. “This is what you call a proper bed?”

Hunk cocks his head to the side. “Yes?”

“I, just.” Keith laughs a little bit more, as if unable to do anything else. Waves his hands at the bed in little gesture that manages to be both helpless and forlorn. “This bed is hardly proper.”

Hunk can’t help but just look at Keith, baffled and amused. “Well, it’s hardly _improper_ , now is it? Like beds could even be proper or improper.”

Keith rakes a hand through his hair, laughs shortly again, and stares at the bed some more. “Right. Okay.”

“If you are done being ridiculous,” Hunk says shortly, head and hip cocked, arms crossed. “We still haven’t finished your room.”

“There’s more?” Keith asks, voice faint as if he’d just taken a vicious punch to the solar plexus. He laughs—giggles really—and runs a hand through his hair again. “Of course there is.”

Hunk sighs, holds out a hand to Keith, fingers crooked just a little. “Of course there’s more. You need a wardrobe, don’t you? A desk? Basics.”

“Basics,” Keith murmurs as he places his hand in Hunk’s as if a puppet on strings. “Of course.”

Hunk closes his hand around Keith’s and tugs him gently, lightly down the stone dais, mindful of the way Keith stubbles and slides into him. He sighs, bemused and oddly affectionate. Faintly entertained at how overwhelmed Keith becomes at the simplest things. “This place can provide you with whatever you wish,” he explains softly, like one would talk to a frightened kitten—newly-weaned and nervous. “You just have to know how to ask.”

Keith looks up at him with an unreadable expression, fingers tightening in Hunk’s grasp. “Like you learned to ask?”

Hunk raises his right hand to study his branded hand in a way he hadn’t in gods only knew how long—tilting it right and left as it glimmered and glowed under the lights he’d conjured. “I suppose,” he says. “And what you cannot ask for, you can ask me.”

Keith laughs—a hiccupping breath dragged through his lungs—and presses one hand against his mouth. “Sure,” he says, runs his tongue across his top teeth and then laughs again. “Okay.”

“Are you all right?” Hunk asks curiously, cautious and gentle where Keith clings to his arm, stares up at him with wide, verbena eyes. 

“Sure, fine,” Keith answers too quickly to be the truth.

Hunk frowns, tightens his hand around Keith’s fingers. “No lies,” he says, a gentle reminder, a soft warning. “You promised to be honest.”

A shudder runs through Keith from his head to his toes. Hunk feels it rattle through his body like a freight train off the tracks. “Right,” Keith murmurs. “Right. Honesty.” He presses a hand against his mouth again, looks away with a jerk of his head and vibrates of barely controlled tension. “This is just … too much. It’s so sudden.” He laughs again. Hunk has heard more laughter from this boy made of rage and defiance in the last ten minutes than the entire gods knows how many weeks they had lived together in these halls of emerald and shadow. “I’ve gone from nothing to all this.” He makes a gesture with his free hand that manages to include the bed, the workshops, and Hunk. “To you.”

“Me?” Hunk repeats, and can’t even begin to attempt to keep the confusion from his voice.

“You have no idea,” Keith says, looking at him almost sadly. “Just what things are like here. None at all.”

“You keep saying that,” Hunk comments mildly, unable to find it within himself to be annoyed. For all of Keith’s soft, sad tone, he is after all only pointing out the obvious. “And we’ll see how true it is today.”

“We will?” Keith asks, uncertain and careful.

Hunk makes a faint hum of agreement low in his throat. “If I can finish your mark today, we are going out.”

“Oh,” Keith more breathes than says. His voice the faintest of exhales. “Okay.”

Hunk tugs him further into the room, right hand making lazy, precise movements in the air as if tracing currants in the sea. Furniture bubbles up out of the floor—low couches for lounging, a desk, mannequins for holding armour, weapon racks, training dummies—following the movement of his hand like particularly attentive hounds. Keith follows after him, tripping a little over unresponsive feet, too busy staring at all Hunk conjures with thoughtless, artful hands.

When he’s done his dusts off his hands like a gardener with a new crop of plants. Surveys his work, nods, comments lightly, “That should do it.”

Keith waves his free hand at the room, now filled with every manner of thing Hunk could imagine he’d need. “What do I do with all of this?”

Hunk shrugs, “Whatever you like?” He claps a hand to Keith’s shoulder, heavy and fond. Just hard enough to jar him out of whatever dark path his mind had decided to wander. “I’m going back to the forge. You can get settled.”

He leaves Keith standing in the middle of his new room, and tries not to think of how very small and lost he looks.

///

It takes him longer than he’d like to work out an idea for Keith’s mark. He rejects the idea of a collar with a shudder—too close to slavery and too much a haunting echo of Haggar. No way for him to pretend at their differences if he follows her footsteps that closely. But other ideas escape him as swiftly as sand through a clenched fist.

Hunk leans back in his chair, designs and diagrams littering his work table as if a great wind had ripped apart a library—paper sliding off wood and onto stone, fluttering in the soft wind that always moves through his workshops like the breath of a great beast. He balls up the latest sketch—bracers with his sigil set within them bound on each side with wards powerful and arcane—and throws it at the far wall. Lazy slithers, bounds to catch it, making the delicate onion paper flare and turn to ash the second the soot sprite wraps one smoke-and-brimstone tendril around it.

“Artist’s block?” Keith asks, sliding into the room on near silent feet.

Hunk turns his head slightly as Keith moves into view, scowls in a way he knows is petulant, pouty as a three-year-old told they can’t have a sweet—and sighs. “Something like that.”

Keith crosses his arms over his chest, wrapping them around himself in a manner Hunk can’t help but read as self-soothing, and cocks his head to consider a design. “What are these?”

“Ideas for your mark,” Hunk says, rubbing his eyes with one hand, pinching down hard on the bridge of his nose. “Nothing works. I hate pretty much all of my designs.” 

“Oh,” Keith says, that distant and overwhelmed tone creeping back into his voice like a thief in the night, stealing all the budding good cheer and confidence to be found there. 

Hunk opens his eyes after several long heartbeats when it becomes painfully apparent that Keith will not, or cannot, say anything else. “Do you have any ideas for what you would want?” He asks, waves a hand at his covered table. “I’m hitting a wall and it’s starting to hurt my head.”

“You would let me choose?” Keith asks, soft and hesitant, as if turning over a particularly difficult problem. 

Hunk scrubs a hand over his eyes where they burn from so much time spent staring at charcoal and graphite sketches. “You’re going to be the one wearing the damned thing,” he grumbles, feeling unreasonably peevish. Bites down on the inside of his mouth. Reminds himself to be _kind_. Reminds himself that this entire mess was so much harder on Keith than it ever would be on himself. That he needed to be _kind_. “I’d rather make you something that you like if it’s possible.”

Keith collects some of his discarded designs, cast aside like forgotten lovers and left in a neglected pile, and considers them with gentle fingers. “You already made me a sword.”

Hunk snorts, folds himself over the table, heedless of how he crushes and rumples his sketches, scatters his pencils. “That, unfortunately, does not count as a mark,” he says into his arms. “It has to be something you wear.”

“Like a collar?” Keith asks and Hunk can’t place his tone. Knows without looking at him that Keith is fingering the heavy black collar Haggar set around his neck, an unsubtle and inelegant brand. 

“I’m not making you another collar,” he says without lifting his head. “Ask for something else.”

Keith breathes out a faint sigh, though for the life of him Hunk can’t figure out why. “Not a sword, not a collar, what else is not allowed?”

Hunk shrugs, turns his head in the pillow of his arms and contemplates Keith’s thoughtful profile. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I’ve been sketching for hours it feels like but nothing feels right.”

Keith lays the designs back on the table, as gentle as a monk with a rare tome. “You have, actually, been sketching for hours.” He comments lightly. He pulls another set of papers into his hands, carefully organizing them by some internal system, hums thoughtfully, and places one before Hunk. “That, maybe?”

Hunk drags himself back into his chair, pulls the design with him, makes a low, thoughtful sound in the back of his throat. It’s a signet ring design, heavy and simple. His sigil set in onyx and topaz. Band thick and jewels rich. It would hurt, he thinks idly as he studies his design anew, quite a bit to get hit with that ring. Leave wide, stinging marks, rip delicate skin and bruise flesh. 

“A signet ring?” He asks, slouches back into his chair and rubs at his chin. Holds the design up in hand and tilts it thoughtfully. “That may work.” Hunk glances at Keith, takes in his fighter’s pose, his swordsman’s posture, and frowns a little. “It won’t get in the way when you fight?”

Keith grins at him, fast and fierce. “Nah.”

///

Hunk mentally categorizes the process of making Keith’s signet ring into one of failures and attempts organized by how long it took to reach failure. 

Attempt 1 

Time to Failure: 2 day and 8 hours. 

Cause of Failure: molten silver does not move through the centrifuge at the same rates as bronze meaning calculation of pour rate was incorrect, resulting in a miss happened mess of silver that Keith now gleefully uses as a paperweight. (Hunk restrains himself from throwing it at his head with the litany that he must be kind, kind, kind.)

Attempt 2

Time to Failure: 4 hours

Cause of Failure: slicing self during wax carving setting off Keith’s mother hen instincts and getting banned from the workshop until the bleeding stops. (Keith is _loud_ when he feels he is being ignored.)

Attempt 3

Time to Failure: 2 days and 4 hours

Cause of Failure: inconsistent heating through the kiln resulting the plaster burning apart and complete failure of the mold. Keith laughs and laughs and _laughs_ as Hunk gently beats his head against the now-cooled kiln. (Hunk resolves to not get distracted by Keith moving through his sword forms even if he is very, very bored babysitting the kiln.)

Attempt 4

Time to Failure: 2 days and 6 hours

Cause of Failure: centrifuge doesn’t distribute the silver correctly through the mold resulting once again in a bizarre silver sculpture that Keith claims as his own and absconds with back into his own chambers. (Hunk puts his head in his hands and indulges in a solid fifteen minutes of screaming.)

Attempt five finally works.

Keith huddles close to his shoulder, bottom lip caught between his teeth as Hunk gently lowers the super-heated mold into the cooling vat. They both blow out relieved breaths, twin excited grins growing across their faces, as Hunk lifts the ring from the hissing waters.

“Yes,” Hunk hisses, all tension draining from his shoulders like water through a sieve. He feels his shoulders melt from relief. 

Keith gives a short, vicious crow of victory and claps his shoulder hard enough to make Hunk rock with the force of it. “Finally!”

Hunk laughs, and if he’s a little hysterical with it Keith kindly says nothing, nods and gently drops the ring on the table. “Finally,” he agrees softly. “Finally.”

///

It takes him another two days to set the stones, finish the polish, and craft the wards—protections against fire, against steel, against warping words. But just shy of two weeks he sits with a ring that glows with a soft golden light, feels like a piece of sunshine in his cupped palm, all parts of it humming with leashed power. It looks like nothing he’s ever made before. It looks like everything he’s ever made. The sum total and perfect epitome of his craft.

He holds it up to the light, turns it from side to side to study it, and then grins at Keith. “Look good?”

Keith gives him a jerky nod, eyes blown wide and stunned. His hands tremble slightly when Hunk places the ring in them. He holds it in both hands like it was liquid gold threatening to run between his fingers. He holds it like he might hold his own soul and redemption. Hunk catches the ring before it can hit the floor when Keith’s shaking fingers fumble with it—the earthquake tremor of his body shaking it lose from his grasp.

“Here,” Hunk says gently, like one might talk to a frightened animal running on instinct, caught on the knife’s edge of flight. Takes Keith’s hand and holds it firm, stills the shaking with careful fingers, slides the ring on—heavy and grounding. When they both breath out it feels like the entire space of the workshops does with them. Feels as if something slots into place around them in this place of magic and creation. 

Keith holds his hand out in front of him, moves his hand from side to side to watch the light move over the onyx and amber sigil set in the silver. Hunk’s symbol set glowing stone and protective magic. 

“Looks good,” he agrees, the tremor in his voice matching the shaking of his limbs. 

“Let’s get this off you, then,” Hunk says, his voice as quiet as a petitioner’s in a confessional—a hushed request between the two of them as if they fear discovery. (They do.) If his hands shake when he reaches for the heavy silver and black collar set around Keith’s neck like a brand, like a declaration of ill-intent, there’s no one who would comment upon it. 

Keith bows his head, drops his hands limply to his sides, and they both catch their breath—throats closing in anticipation and muted fear—as Hunk undoes one buckle, then another, and another until it falls to the floor with faint thump. No surge of malicious magic over takes them, no vicious and pestilent wind springs up around them, just the small, muted sound of leather and silver hitting the stone floor. The sound tiny and insignificant for such a momentous occasion, Hunk feels. He thinks, briefly, of bending to pick up the thick leather with its silver buckles, but Keith trembles under his palm—shaking fit to break apart.

Or perhaps he’s already broken to pieces and these are just the aftershocks. Phantom tremors after the volcano explosion of emotion and release.

Hunk hooks his hand around Keith’s bared and bowed neck—slides it down and around to fit his fingers to that delicate throat and tug him, gentle and as kind as Hunk knows how to be, into an embrace that is anything but easy.

Keith stands there in the circle of his arms, face pressed damp and sharp into the meat of Hunk’s shoulder, and shivers like a horse run too far, too hard. All sinews and bone shuddering with each ragged breath. Hunk tucks that dark head under his chin, slots that sturdy body into his arms, and holds on. Holds on like a drowning man with his bit of wood in the face of the sea’s rage. 

Holds, and holds, and holds until storm of Keith’s emotions sweeps through them both. 

Slowly, as if unsure of his welcome, Keith fits his arms around Hunk, fingertips barely brushing each other across Hunk’s back. Hunk sighs, as deep and weighty as a gust from his forge’s bellows. Keith seems to take that as some sort of sign, as a signal of acceptance, and burrows closer as if he can bury himself inside Hunk’s arms and live there.

Hunk stands, counts his breaths as they rise through his diaphragm, spread the bones of his ribs, rattle out his mouth. Lets his breath become an ocean’s wave, a steady and endless cycle moving through his body and, by extension, through Keith’s. Lets himself be, for a heartbeat, for fifty, a pillar, a rock, and a sedentary stone against which Keith can shriek his rage and terror and desperate betrayal. 

He wraps his arms around Keith’s shoulders where they shudder against his chest, fits his cheek against the silk of his hair, and holds on. Thinks of chemical equations and rates of temperature exchange through metal and lets him shake and scream as if his heart were ending, all parts of it turned to dust.

Hunk’s idly converting chemical notation into alchemical theory when Keith finally, haltingly, goes still in his arms. Feels Keith curl in on himself in reflexive embarrassment. Takes that a sign to release him, hands sliding down surprisingly broad shoulders and muscled arms to grasp him at the forearms and hold him at a polite distance. Looks him over with careful expression but fails to find the words.

“Okay,” Keith says, breathes, eyes closed and face surprisingly calm. “I’m okay.”

Hunk’s eyebrow hitches towards his hairline and he makes a low noise of skepticism without meaning to, it slides out his mouth unbidden and unlooked for like a pickpocket in a crowd.

“I will be,” he amends—lips quirking when Hunk makes another disbelieving sound. “Pro-mph.”

Hunk places two fingers of his lips and shakes his head. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Not here.”

Keith rolls his eyes, but acquiesces without a fight. 

///

Hunk decides to pick a fight with his wardrobe rather than give into the pressing urge to have a screaming meltdown at the idea of leaving his workshops. His haven and area of control. The idea that he would have to leave, walk out into the unknown, was one he’s resolutely avoiding as completely as a mouse avoids a hunting cat, all parts of his mind primed to run at the slightest hint of the topic. 

He throws shirt after shirt, piles tunics and gilded jackets, breeches, pants and what looks to be a kilt of leather on top of the pile. Rejects each and every garment while his wardrobe riffles through hanging clothes, the rich fabrics, with an irate wind. 

“Seriously,” he grumbles at it, more than a little astounded at the sheer wealth of black and silver it presents him with, “is there a reason you hate colour so much?”

“Are you … _arguing_ with your wardrobe?” Keith asks from where he leans on the chamber door, all lines of his body writ with false relaxation.

Hunk spares him an unkind glance over his shoulder before going back to glowering at his wardrobe like a particularly displeased gargoyle. “I wouldn’t be,” he grouses, shoulders rolling in vain attempt to release tension, “if it could produce something with actual colour.”

His wardrobe speeds through luxurious silks and velvet as if thumbing through a book and slams the doors shut.

Hunk snarls under his breath, furious and frustrated, while Keith nearly doubles over in laughter. Digs his fingers between the heavy doors set in midnight stone and heaves against it. The wardrobe swings open on silent hinges, sending him sprawling. Keith laughs harder, sliding down the edge of the doorframe, gripping it with both hands in a failed attempt to keep himself upright.

When he hauls himself back to his feet he finds only two outfits hanging in the wardrobe—stark in their lonesomeness. One a simple shirt in deep crimson silk with matching black pants, heavy leather bracers and a jacket done in a midnight hide of some animal he can’t recognize. Hunk tosses it to Keith without looking. “This is yours, I think.”

Doesn’t bother to look to see if Keith catches it, merely trusts in Keith’s nearly preternatural reflexes and pulls his own outfit from the wardrobe with a grimly victorious smile. “Thank you,” he tells the wardrobe, fighting to keep his voice from sliding into snide. “I do like yellow.”

Keith eyes the fabric in Hunk’s hands and snorts a short laugh. “Yellow and black, aren’t you afraid of looking like a bumblebee?”

“Better than Haggar’s colours,” he replies, yanking his shirt over his head and tossing it carelessly towards his bed, and Keith goes still and silent in the doorway. His wardrobe snaps its doors shut in what, to his biased ears, sounds like a sulky snap. His clothes are still more black than yellow, still with more buckles than necessary, and he feels uncomfortably certain that he looks like he fell into a clothing rack at a renaissance fair and decided to wear everything, but it works.

Keith blinks at him slow and considering. Hunk wavs a finger at him. “Not a word,” he grumps. “I know I look stupid.”

“That’s not the word I’d use,” Keith replies faintly, chewing on his bottom lip. Hunk eyes him suspiciously, suspecting a laugh hiding underneath his bland reply. 

Hunk sighs, feels the whine climbing up his throat and gives in. “I hate dressing up. Hate it. I look like draft horse in pony barding.”

Keith pats his back sympathetically. Opens his mouth, shakes his head as if dismissing a thought and then shrugs. “You know how much image matters here.”

“ _Hate it,_ ” Hunk repeats, petulant and pouty, but he lets Keith pull him from his room with an eyeroll and gentle hands.

“You’ll hate it a whole lot more if Haggar comes and finds you when you haven’t come to her as she requested,” Keith tells him with deadly seriousness.

“Requested,” Hunk says with air quotes and then wilts under Keith’s unamused gaze. “Are you sure we have to do this today?”

Keith sighs, holds up one hand and counts down his reasons on one hand—the body language reminds Hunk so strongly of Lance that he can feel the tears prickle at the corner of his eyes, his lungs seizing like an engine with sugar in it. “First, we’ve already delayed this by nearly two weeks while you made my ring. Second, if I let you, you’ll bury yourself in another project that just ‘has to get done’—“ Hunk feels the air quotes are excessive and sulks, Keith rolls his eyes –“And third, if we wait much longer Haggar will come find you and we both know that won’t go well for either of us. So yes, we have to do this today.”

Hunk opens his mouth.

“Don’t argue with me when you know I’m right,” Keith not quite snaps, but Hunk can feel edges of Keith’s patience fraying faster than sleeves of a well-loved sweater.

Hunk shuts his mouth.

Keith blows out a breath that makes his bangs flutter, rolls his shoulders and then cocks his head to the side, a faint smile playing at the edges of his lips. “I was not expecting you to be this … uh.”

“Cautious?” Hunk supplies when Keith’s words fail him. “Worried? Scared? My default setting is mildly freaked out about everything and here I live, like, a half-second from a screaming breakdown all the time.”

“But you don’t,” Keith says softly, seriously, earnestness writ across his every feature. “You _don’t._ And you won’t now.”

Now its Hunk’s turn to blow out an uneven breath like pressure valve trying to find even keel. He rakes a hand through his hair and then grimaces when he realizes how long it’s become. Nearly half way down his shoulders. Just how long, he wonders in a slight daze, has he been in this place?

He can choose, Hunk tells himself, to freak out or to move on.

He moves on.

Yanking his hair into an uneven and inelegant braid, he looks back at Keith and feels his face pull into a grim frown. Keith quirks an eyebrow at him. “You look like you are going into battle.”

“I feel like it,” Hunk agrees. The off-hand comment makes something ping in his mind. “Get your sword.”

Keith blinks at him. Opens his mouth as if to argue but something in Hunk’s expression keeps him quiet and thoughtful. Without another word, he hauls himself up the walls and into the shadowed recesses of the smithy, moving too fast for Hunk to quite catch how he manages to scale the seemingly smooth walls. Leaving that as a mystery for another day, Hunk rummages through his finished and forgotten projects before pulling out a long scabbard.

Hunk turns them over in his hands wondering at it a little. A project of his own devising from when he first started learning magic wards. His first moment of boldness when he dared etch his own sigil into leather and steel wrought in pleasing forms. The light catches the onyx and amber stones, flaring with a golden light just as Keith drops from the rafters, light and silent as any cat.

Hunk tries not to read anything into that.

“Here,” he says, thrusting the scabbard at Keith. “It’s not my best work.”

“Shut up,” Keith replies without any heat, all focus on the scabbard he takes with reverent hands, as if touching a relic. He slides the sword in, each glowing rune vanishing into the black-and-gold of the scabbard like a star winking out on the horizon. They both hold their breath until the blade sinks home with a faint click that rings in the breathless silence.

Keith locks the scabbard around his slender hips, shifting it where it rests light and subtle against him. Fixes his bracers with short, sharp gestures and then looks up to nod at Hunk.

“Well,” Hunk says, tries to keep his fear and anxiety from making his voice tremble like a leaf in a winter gale. “That’s that.”

He’s not sure what he was expecting when he pushes open the great double doors of his workshops—a vast array of inhuman eyes to lock upon him, glittering in the dark; or perhaps a great outcry of nameless voices, terrible and beautiful. Something more, Hunk thinks ruefully to himself, than an empty hallway of emerald, silver, and silence. He blows out a breath and laughs quietly at himself.

“Do you kno—“ Keith begins to ask him, silence by Hunk’s raised hand and thoughtful expression. “I guess you do,” he says more to himself, Hunk thinks, than to anyone else when Hunk turns to stride purposefully down the hallway. Keith trots alongside him, casting him concerned looks out of the corner of his eyes as Hunk navigates the glittering halls without pause.

Hunk’s grateful Keith says nothing, asks nothing, because he couldn’t explain it if he tried. Simply feels a hook underneath his ribs that drags him along the hallway like a fish on a line. Hears her voice whispering directions through her halls like a faint song on a distant wind—wild and dangerous, but an irresistible call.

He could find her blind, deaf and mute. 

He could find her with every one of his senses dead and dying.

A certainty settles over him like a mantle, like a heavy cape, chasing away each of his fears and every piece of his anxiety. Hunk strides through the halls, ignoring any look cast his way, insensible to any susurration of whispers that springs up in their wake. 

When they reach the massive doors that lead to her hall, Hunk stretches out his right hand—brand blazing like a dying star in his palm—and the doors explode open with a boom that rattles the ground at their feet like a cannon blast, like falling mortar.

Haggar looks up from where she lies draped across her throne of ice and thorns, languid as a great cat after a hunt—bored and bloody and terrible purpose in each graceful line of her body. She graces him with a smile of awful delight, thin lips drawing up over dainty yellow fangs, eyes blazing with glee. 

“Allura, sweet poppet,” she croons at the woman standing before her—regal and terrifying. “Meet my artificer. You have, of course, already taken note of his work.”

Hunk’s breath catches in his throat as the woman turns slowly, her attention sweeping over him as deadly as a hurricane at sea. A golden crown sits on her brow, a dainty and demanding piece of jewelry. Her eyes blaze like flame from a blowtorch—a glorious blue that threatens to burn all around it. Her skin a deep, rich brown that reminds Hunk of warm woods and growing things. 

She looks like a photo-negative of Haggar—beautiful and striking the ways a storm is beautiful, the desert as you lay dying of thirst, stark and deadly.

“I see,” Allura replies, her eyes burning through Hunk as if she could pry out his soul to inspect it. “How lucky for you to have found him.”

Haggar cackles like a raven with fresh carrion, rests her cheek on one arm and extends her hand to Hunk, curls black-tipped fingers at him in loving fondness. “Come here, my noble heart,” she calls soft and affectionate. “Come meet your compatriot.”

Hunk comes to her without a second thought, pulled by the string that connects him to her like leash only she can command. She strokes gentle talons over his cheek as he ducks his head to meet her touch. “My apologies,” he rasps, voice dragged out of him harsh and painful. “For my late arrival.”

“Forgiven,” Haggar says with a dismissive flick of her fingers. She stretches, graceful and boneless, before slinking back into bored insolence. “Your timing is, of course, impeccable.”

Hunk has the unsettling feeling that she planned for his arrival, mapped out each path and scripted every word, but cannot see, exactly, how.

Allura makes a faint sound of disgust. “Indeed,” she hisses, hostility like a knife in the ribs. “Now he can explain how he stole my artificer’s plans.”

“What?” Hunk yelps, offended pride taking control of his vocal cords before his mind can properly engage. “I haven’t been out of my workshops since I got here.”

“A likely story,” Allura says disbelieving and snide.

Hunk waves at Keith. “Ask him. He’s been with me almost the entire time.”

“Yes, Allura, ask him,” Haggar repeats, sing-songs with snide pleasure. “You know that boy can’t lie.”

Keith curls in on himself under their combined consideration, shoots a look at Hunk and seems to take some sort of comfort from his presence. He looks between Haggar and Allura with uncertain eyes, and then edges closer to Hunk. “No one but Haggar has come to visit Hunk while I have been there and Hunk has never left until today,” Keith affirms quietly.

“The boy could lie,” Allura snaps at Haggar.

Haggar cackles, extends her linked fingers before her and grins, crooked and not a piece of it reassuring. “As well as setting hen retrieves,” she replies. “Lies so poorly the truth of the matter is all the more revealed. Isn’t that why you removed him from your court?”

Allura narrows those brilliant eyes at Haggar and then turns them, cold and hard as ancient glacier ice upon Keith. Her rage a tangible thing that slides across the skin like rusted knives.

Hunk steps in front of Keith, moving with his instincts as surprised as Keith, who draws in a shaking breath. Stands in front of Keith and finds the words springing into his mind, unbidden and unknown until the second they tumble out his mouth. “Are you offering harm to one of my court?” he asks, quiet and calm as he has never been before. He ignores Haggar’s delighted, crowing laughter and the way Keith goes statue still behind him. An odd, calm rage blazes in his breast as he shifts to block Allura’s advance on Keith. Possessive fury sweeps through him like a winter wind. “I will answer for any insult he may have offered.”

Allura blinks, slow and measured—the threat of her temper muted by confusion. “You gave him a court,” she asks Haggar, those flame blue eyes never leaving Hunk’s. 

“It seemed the done thing,” Haggar answers, draping herself between the armrests of her throne, looking nothing so much as a puppet with its strings cut, “when it comes to artificers.” 

Allura’s head snaps around so fast that Hunk’s surprised that she doesn’t pull every tendon. “You mock me.”

Haggar smiles slow and sweet and sinister. “Only if you mock yourself.”

“Allura,” a voice like pipping bird-song interrupts, high and clear as a boy’s soprano. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t take my designs. Look at his hands.”

Allura shifts slightly—skirts swirling around her long legs like sea foam on a cresting wave—revealing a slender figure only half as tall as any of them. Slight and ambiguous as only the very young can be. They press two fingers to the bridge of their glasses and favour Hunk with a lopsided smile. “His hands are too big.”

Hunk resists the urge to hide his hands as everyone immediately turns to look at them. He blinks at this new figure, confused and flustered.

‘I’m Pidge,’ they mouth at Hunk as Haggar resumes mocking Allura in gentle tones. ‘Send Keith to me. He knows the way.’

   
iv. The Terrified Ones, the Hopeful Ones, the Angry Ones, the Cold Ones 

It takes three days of Keith hovering at the edges of his peripheral vision, sulking in the rafters betrayed only by the occasional whispers of sound, lurking in the shadows, before he finally breaks down. Hunk is distantly impressed at Keith’s emotional control—he’d placed an internal bet that Keith wouldn’t last past the 32-hour mark of Hunk’s careful, gentle silence. 

“Aren’t you going to ask?” Keith demands, hands crossed over his chest, brow furrowed in a deep and unforgiving frown. Hunk imagines that Keith thinks his posture is defiant—aggressive and intimidating—but Hunk’s learning to read his body language the way he’s learned to read the books of magic Haggar leaves scattered around his workspaces like forgotten and pining lovers. The curl of Keith’s shoulders, the crooked frown, the way Keith’s gaze skitters away from his all betray his discomfort and confusion.

Hunk shrugs with one shoulder, goes back to measuring out the delicate and finicky proportions of wraith dust needed for his newest project. “You didn’t seem to want to talk about it,” he says finally as Keith starts to fidget with nervous energy. “I didn’t want to press.”

Keith makes a disbelieving noise in the back of his throat. Scoffs when Hunk looks up to raise a mild eyebrow at him. “It’s you,” Keith says, exasperation weighing down his tone like sodden clothes dragging a drowning sailor. “You’d press the queen of air and darkness.”

Hunk opens his mouth to argue—remembers teasing, cajoling, tricking Haggar into revealing secrets and shrugs. He tries not to argue with things he knows are true. It’s a dangerous endeavor in this shadow realm of silver and secret. “Maybe,” he says diffidently, refusing to lift his gaze from his work. “But you were upset, and I didn’t want to cause you more pain.”

“I wasn’t _upset_ ,” Keith defends hotly.

“Promise,” Hunk chides gently. “You made a promise.”

Keith makes a sound through his teeth like a tea kettle left too long on a hot stove. “I was maybe a little … disoriented to see Pidge again.”

“Is that her name?” Hunk asks, blinks dark eyes at Keith in overdone innocence. “I really didn’t catch it at the time.”

Keith throws up his hands in disgust. “Just ask already. Gods.”

Hunk gives him a narrow-eyed look and Keith rolls his eyes. Dusting his hands off on his apron, he crosses his arms over his chest, leans a hip against a work table and contemplates his next move. Keith fidgets like a schoolboy expecting to be scolded. Hunk sighs as he feels the anger drain out him like bathwater after a pulled plug. He’s never been very good at holding grudges—that’s always been Lance’s talent. “Seems like a big thing to keep secret,” he comments gently. “The entire ‘got yourself kicked out of another court’ thing.”

Keith blows out a breath, face pulling in the tight lines of irritated defensiveness. “It’s not something that I like to remember.”

Hunk cocks his head, arches an eyebrow and waits until Keith squirms ever so slightly under his gaze. “The fact that you know the other court’s artificer seems to be a very big thing to keep secret. At least to me.”

The way Keith deflates all at once reminds Hunk of nothing so much as a puppy that’s been kicked. Something in the corners of his heart twinges at the defeated slump of Keith’s shoulders and the way he won’t raise his head, choosing instead to hide behind the messy fall of his hair. “I didn’t mean to,” Keith mumbles so softly his words slur together in a mush of wounded syllables. “It just never seemed like a good time.”

Hunk hums low in his throat at that, finding the words to be both true and untrue in the way that only guiltily held secrets come leaking out the edges of things left unsaid. He considers pressing the advantage, using the guilt and shame to break apart Keith’s defenses, but discards the idea ultimately long-term destructive. Eyes Keith where he slumps against his work table—wilted and exhausted—before nudging one of the long-necked silver beakers at him. “Fill that with Endrega blood, could you?”

Keith blinks, glances down at the beaker and frowns at him faintly. “Which one is Endrega blood?”

Hunk goes back to carefully combining the necessary ingredients for fire warding charms, hissing when they sputter and throw off clinging sparks. “Farthest on the end, smokes when it oxidizes.”

“Great,” Keith mutters under his breath—more to himself than to Hunk so he ignores it politely. “Guess I’m not forgiven yet.”

“Hurry, please,” Hunk grunts as he shifts mixing bowls around. “These compounds destabilize quickly and then become worthless.”

He’s gratified when Keith moves with a distinct hustle, shuffling back with the beaker held before him like one might hold a slowly cracking bottle of particularly caustic chemicals—all wide eyes and very careful hands. Well, Hunk thinks to himself as he carefully partitions the elements of the spell into their necessary parts, he’s not entirely wrong. 

“Um,” Keith says with particular eloquence.

“Pour it here,” Hunk directs, motioning with one hand to the etched pewter bowl holding a gently steaming mess of barely solid dusts and finely ground gems. “Slowly,” he cautions, and then raises his right hand, brand pulsing in time with his heart, steady and calm. “Just a light drizzle.”

“Right,” Keith mutters, bottom lip caught between his teeth, brow furrowed as he gently tips the beaker to allow the smoking liquid to drop like rubies from a rich woman’s fingers—fat and heavy drops hissing as they vanish into fine dusts. 

Hunk holds his hand out, brand down, over the bowl and murmurs incantations low and alien—vowels slip-sliding out his mouth in a cacophony of nauseating sound. Keith shudders next to him, but the steady drip of liquid out the mouth of the beaker, like blood from an open wound, doesn’t falter. Hunk pulls his hand away and considers their work with a critical gaze, tips the bowl around so the contents slide and smear across its sides like entrails across a butcher’s block. Keith shivers next to him.

“Did Pidge have you help her like this?” he asks quietly, doesn’t look up from where he slowly mixes the components of the spell. He already knows the answer anyway from the way Keith trembles and jolts next to him like a spooked horse, all nerves and rolling eyes. 

“No,” comes the terse reply. 

“Does she do this kind of work?” Hunk asks—gentle, casual, as if asking after a distantly known mutual acquaintance. Not the tiny girl who was his supposed rival and enemy. 

“I don’t know?” Keith says, head cocked, a line forming between his brows, as if trying to remember the parts of an infrequently used equation. “I don’t think so? She had more, uh, gears? Moving parts?”

Hunk hums, nods, sets aside the pewter bowl and its components as they oxidize and writhe. “Like robots?”

“Like golems,” Keith says without thinking as if lulled by Hunk’s own absent tone, then blinks before nodding to himself. “Yeah, like golems. She used to spend hours, days, writing scripts for golems.”

That, Hunk thought to himself, was an interesting bit of information if they ever went to war with the courts of light. “No weapons?”

Keith laughs low in his throat. “You saw her. You think she could forge a sword? Work a smith?”

“You never know,” Hunk replies easily, jostles him with one shoulder. “Surprising things come in small packages.”

That startles a laugh out of Keith and he huffs in mock annoyance. “I’m not small.”

“Itty-bitty,” Hunk teases. “Tell me about Pidge.”

Keith looks down at his hands and bites his lip, looks for a heartbeat as if he was going to cry. “I think she was my best friend.”

Hunk looks up, hands stilling as they move through arcane figures, and makes a low, questioning sound—unwilling to push but at the same time painfully curious. He never could leave anything well enough alone when he could push and prod at it until he got the answers he wanted. Never could resist a mystery, no matter the form it draped itself in.

“Best friend?” He asks gently, as soft as he knows how. “Or best friend?”

Keith gives him the blankest look for half a second and Hunk can see him turn that thought upside down until it slots correctly in his head. Hunk resists the urge to laugh as colour climbs up Keith’s neck and he splutters out a cough. “Friend, just friend. Not like, uh—” For a moment Hunk thinks that Keith is going to say Lance, that whatever his relationship with this mysterious Pidge isn’t like Hunk and Lance, but Keith ducks his head away from Hunk’s gaze and shrugs. “Not like with Shiro.”

Hunk blinks, for a moment completely confused, and then the memory of their promise—of Keith’s furiously determined stare and sharp words—rushes over him like a returning tide. Of course, he chides himself, Keith has his own lost person, his own desperate search. Hunk opens his mouth to respond and finds for a moment his voice trapped in his throat like a bird in a cage. Has to swallow hard and grating, to drag it out his mouth. “Right. Your missing friend.”

Keith nods without looking at him, studies his hands instead and Hunk wishes desperately for a moment that he could simply stare into Keith’s head to pry out his hidden thoughts. “Pidge helped me track him. I don’t know how, and she’d never tell me what she gave up, but she found that he was here, in the courts of chaos.”

“Damn,” Hunk breathes, and Keith huffs out a soft laugh.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “She helped me get sent to Haggar.” Keith flicks a glance up at Hunk from under the dark sweep of his lashes, expression hesitant. “To you.” 

That catches Hunk for a moment, ignites something under his ribs that he doesn’t want to consider too closely. He wants, badly, to push at that shy little comment, so close to a confession that Hunk wants to recoil from the implications. He wants to delve in and push until he knows. He wants to prod and to pry until his curiosity is sated like a monstrous predator after a hunt, but he knows that to push Keith know would render whatever they are building between each other stunted with distrust and suspicion. So he gathers his overwhelming need to know and locks it down inside himself, makes a barricade of his teeth against the pressing questions, and smiles as soft as he knows how. Chucking Keith gently under his chin, making him jolt at the unexpected touch, cocks his head. “You don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”

Keith raises one eyebrow slowly in an overdone gesture of disbelief. Hunk spares a stray thought to wonder when he learned that type of subtle sarcasm, so ill-fitting with this direct and blunt approach to everything else. “I thought you promised not to lie?” Keith asks, voice as dry as ancient bones.

Hunk makes a rude noise at him. “I’m not lying. If you don’t want to talk about it, we don’t have to.”

That earns him a thoughtful look and a long, contemplative silence before Keith laughs to himself, a mere whisper of sound. Keith just cocks his head slowly to one side, not bothering to say a word—his rebuke clear in his body language, which always spoke more easily than any words he manages to force out his mouth.

Hunk wrinkles his nose at the implied threat—either he’d have to abide by what he said or make a liar of himself and risk the wrath of whatever mercurial forces bound the courts as surely as the laws of physics bound the rest of the world. It’s a sneaky trick and Hunk is almost surprised that Keith has it in him to pull it off. 

Almost.

“Sneaky,” he comments and gets an almost shy head duck in response—as if Keith is proud to have pulled that one off. “But I do have some questions.”

Keith pulls a face. “And this is my surprised face. The day you run out of questions is the day the universe dies screaming.”

Something about the phrase drags icy fingers down Hunk’s spine--

**blaaargh cut scenes i don't know what to do with blaaaargh**

 

xi. This Is the Truth They Use to Break You

Hunk doesn’t even sigh when he hears the heavy bolts of the door slam open and his chessmistress’ skirts whisper across the mossy ground, a sibilant sound that used to fill him with aching dread and now only leaves him tired and cold. He doesn’t shudder when her ivory fingers—as frozen and hard as her heart—gently tilt his face to look at her. He doesn’t shy from her glowing gaze as she studies him. Her sigh is the whisper of ice through pines—the breath of winter down mountain sides.

“You did not truly think that you would succeed in this, did you?” she asks. Her voice is so soft, so painfully gentle, that if he had not spent years at her side, on her chessboard, in her bed he would have almost thought her concerned—thought that he had managed to chisel a crack in that glacial heart.

He lets the vial slip from his hands as if forgotten. The delicate crystal bounces on the moss and he doesn’t look to see if it’s cracked. Look to see if the liquid he’d 

lied for _(little lies, grand lies, lies to others, and—worse—lies to himself)_ ; 

schemed for _(promises traded like he and Lance used to trade cards, only the cards had meant more)_ ;

bled for _(the first time a terrible shock to the system, the fifth, tenth, hundredth nothing more than a mild annoyance—either he’d stop bleeding or he’d die, one or the other, switch on or switch off)_ ;

killed for _(amber eyes growing glassy, tiny hands scrambling at his wrist, and he pushes the knife down, down, down)_ ;

is slowly seeping into the grass. He doesn’t look to see if Lance’s last hope is dripping into the moss like his blood on the chessboard. Because Haggar’s gaze has him trapped like a butterfly to a board, speared right through his chest where his foolish heart beats like a caged bird.

“I didn’t,” he replies slowly, finding it to be true as the words slide from his lips. “But I had to try.”

Her lips twist as she considers him—half a frown, half a smile and not a piece of it comforting. She sighs again, breath ghosting over his skin. “It is your poor mortal heart that leads you to this,” she tells him as she has told him so many times. “My greatest piece—so clever, so efficiently brutal—better than I have ever made, and yet this weakness plagues you.”

Her fingers brush over his cheekbones like she’s petting a cat—back and forth, back and forth—once he would have leaned into it, lying to himself that she had learned in her icy way to offer comfort, even if fleeting. Hunk knows better now. His mouth twists into something wry and bitter. “That I have to try?”

“That you love,” she tells him simply.

His heart—poor battered thing that it is—screams at that. No one has ever loved as he loves. What he will do for Lance—to make Lance open his eyes once more—what he has already done for Lance, it comes from a love that has never been seen in this world before and will never be seen again. It shows on his face, everything about Lance always shows on his face. He’s never learned to train that away.

“Poor poppet,” his chessmistress croons. “Poor noble heart. What does it matter that no one has ever loved the way that you love? No snowflake falls the way another has. Each traces its own pattern through the sky. _But we all know this: every snowflake still falls_.”

With this simple truth Hunk’s heart shatters. It detonates inside him like an engine left to run too hot, too long. It is a dead star inside his chest that pulls everything down to it. Caught in steel bands of her slender arms, Hunk screams and screams and screams.

Her fingers through his hair are slivers of ice, frosting the sweaty strands and leaving him as cold as her barren heart. She holds him to her and croons a song older than any civilization. “I could cure this weakness for you,” she offers. Her eyes are as bright at the distant stars

He knows the bargain is rigged, the apple poisoned, but wound any animal enough and it will take any escape. His nod of assent is a tiny movement, but enough. Nothing ever happens in this place without consent—even if that consent is a tainted thing. He doesn’t scream when her fingers dig between his ribs. Doesn’t scream as she pulls his heart—such a tiny piece of human flesh and blood for all the pain it brings him—from his chest. Doesn’t scream as she places a sliver of a flower, as blue as Lance’s eyes, in the space left behind.

When she pulls him to his feet, her hands still so cold and so, so gentle, he doesn’t tremble. She places his fragile heart in his hands as if giving him the most delicate of glass. She shows him how to make the casket of silver and rubies. Shows him how to bind his raging heart in the most delicate of bands. Tells him the words to hide it away in this forgotten forest of frost, moss and sorrow.

When he walks through the forest he doesn’t think to look back. 

 

xii. Goodbye

“It is a problem of equivalent exchange,” he explains calmly as hands scramble at his wrists, across his shoulders, claw at his throat. “The spell demands that something of equal and similar value be given to release what is held.”

Keith arches under his hands, a lovely tremble of limbs and despair. His throat works with a furious need to scream, but all sound is whisked away by the whispering winds of the field. Not a sound disturbs the gently bobbing poppies as they grow, tangled and dense, around the dreamers. It is a place of endless calm and serenity; rage and fear do not mar the air here. Keith’s desperate shout, his piteous pleading, are eaten like the rarest of delicacy by the flowers blooming thick and vibrant around his head.

Hunk smooths a thumb under his eyes, along his cheeks, and smiles gently, like one would with a toddler in a temper. “I realize it is a difficult thing to understand,” Hunk says as Keith thrashes, mouth stretched wide in furious denial. “But I did make a promise.”

Faintly, in the far distance, Hunk can hear something that sounds like a million voices raised in terrible sorrow. The sounding of a grief so vast and endless it overwhelms the mind and crushes the soul, but Hunk pays it no mind. He has learned the value of mortal tears.

He is learning to ignore the weeping of his heart, furious and pained, locked in its box of silver and rubies, hidden a forest of frost and moss.

He holds Keith down in the field of poppies so gently, as gently as when he held him in their bed. Hands a delicate and implacable weight on sturdy ribs, pressing down firm and tenderly on the jut of a hip. Keith shudders and shakes as if his muscles could tear themselves from bone, sinews from fragile cartilage. 

“Hush,” Hunk croons, commands. “Go sweet, gentle love.”

Poppies spring from the ground around them as eager as puppies to pile across their forms. Vines wrapping along thrashing limbs and blooming sweet-smelling flowers that nod their heads gently in the unending twilight. 

“Hunk,” Keith pleads, voice grown quiet enough to escape the ravenous appetite of the poppies. “Please.”

Hunk raises a hand, brushes callused fingers across fine-boned cheeks. “I did promise,” he says, lightly scolds. “We found Lance, you and I, in Lotor’s hall. And you helped me find the potion to free him. So I must return the favor.”

As he holds Keith gently, sweetly, down against the rich earth, the poppies peal back from a patch of earth not but scant meters from where Hunk kneels. Rippling away from the ground like the tide leave the shore, like the shuddering of a great beast.

“Look,” he says, softly tips Keith’s head to the side where it lies limp against the loam. “We have found him.”

Hunk watches—faintly amused, faintly disinterested—as Keith’s eyes grow wide, as glistening tears spring up in the corners of them, his mouth going slack with surprise.

The poppies rear back, blossoms exploding in a bewildering array of petals and magic, to reveal a face—jaw square and righteous, brows high and arching—that makes Keith gasp and then moan in despairing longing. “Shiro.”

“I did promise,” Hunk reminds him tenderly, as if explaining a hard and difficult truth to a precocious but sensitive child. “But nothing comes from nothing.”

Keith closes his eyes, tears making gleaming tracks across his cheeks, down his jaw, to drip silent and lovely into the earth—feeding the poppies that climb lovingly over his shoulders. 

Hunk shifts slightly, allows Keith to reach one shaking arm, one trembling hand, towards the figure slowly being expelled, one dying flower by dying flower, from the field of poppies. Hunk holds him carefully as the poppies climb across his brow like a tender crown of thorns and colour. He remembers, if the flowers will not, the last desperate, reverent whisper—a name called on a dying wind.

Then he sighs, stands, and dusts the dirt from his knees. Studies where the poppies have covered his once-noble guard and guardian in a tender, inescapable embrace. Hunk smiles, a little, to see the delicate and restful expression across Keith’s features as it never was while awake. 

Then he turns to the man slowly dragging himself to sitting, every inch of him noble and kind and good in a way that only knights-shining and paladins-resplendent can be. 

Then he smiles, and if it is cold, if that smile holds less warmth than the dying light of a winter dusk, it is only as things should be in the midnight courts of chaos. 

Extends a hand, imperious and firm. “We have work to be doing, Shirogane. Time you came along.”  
 

xix. Old as the Stars (but not older)

“Lance?” The question is soft and fond and makes every part of his heart break into pieces left to be ground into dust by his own gnawing guilt. “You shouldn’t be here.”

‘Let me get close to you,’ his mind croons, already gone cold and strategic. There is a thing he must do, no matter the cost.

‘Raise your weapon now, now, now,’ his heart shrieks, knowing in helpless despair it has already lost. ‘Don’t let me in; don’t let me.’

“Just coming to check on my favorite guard,” his mouth says, flirtation and charm spinning golden words like honey in a hive. “I can’t come to say hello? I never see you since he posted you here.”

They don’t say who posted Shiro at this gilded door at the end of a silver and shadow hall. A door to a forest—and there’s a bit of metaphysical fuckery that offends pieces of Lance’s analytic soul—filled with silence, frost, and moss. A forest where no mortal can enter and return from unscathed. It’s an unspoken rule among this place that defies rules. A mortal can go into the forest, but a mortal cannot come back out.

Ah well, Lance is good at breaking rules.

He leans against a pillar, thankful for the shadow that hides his face—he’s never been particularly good at lying to the people he loves. Something in his eyes always gives him away. And smiles with the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his chin, lies with the lines and angles of body—each arranged to be open, sweet, and nothing but inviting. 

Shiro sighs, leans against his glaive and studies him with grey eyes gone soft with fondness. 

Lance wonders—not for the first time, but probably for the last—if it is possible to despair of someone so completely that you fall in love with them. 

“You can’t tell me that Hunk has let you come visit just for a social call,” Shiro says, worry and fondness twin forces that twist his lips into something like a smile, if a smile could shatter a heart to pieces at a hundred paces. 

“Then I won’t,” Lance agrees easily. They both know the ways that Lance lies—omission, redirection, a magician’s trick with words and tone. _Look there, not over here. Listen to the pretty wordplay, and not to the truth underneath it._ He shifts, a subtle move that draws Shiro’s eyes to his hips as if dragged by cord. “But it’s not like we tell him everything we do, now do we?”

“Lance,” Shiro says again, sighs with frustrated longing, and Lance knows he’s caught him. Holds him fast with a net of desire, despair and longing for someone that isn’t him but he can fill in for just fine. Lance can play pretend with the best of them.

“Just a little while,” he says, lets his voice slip into that low, inviting purr of promises and pretend. “I’ve been lonely, haven’t you been too?”

Something in Shiro’s expression shifts—and not in a manner Lance had intended. His mind flies to recalibrate his approach, re-tailor the simple seduction. “I got tired,” Shiro says slowly, as if searching for the right words and finding all of his wanting. “Of watching you cut yourself on me, because you couldn’t break through to him.”

“What?” The word springs from his mouth like a torero from a bull. Too loud, too honest, too pained. He blinks, stills in his slow advance, and finds the laughter that comes to his defense like a well-trained dog. “Very poetic, Shiro,” he says and lets laughter guard his tone—a fortress of mirth around his heart. “But I’m pretty sure that doesn’t actually mean anything.”

Shiro’s eyes slide away from his, hurt and pain writ across every feature and for once Lance doesn’t know why. Emotions spill across Shiro’s face, through the lines of his body, and not one of them called there by Lance’s tender manipulations. “I can figure things out, Lance”—and Lance’s nerves decide to choreograph themselves a ballet of terror—“when I see the pattern enough.” Shiro looks up and his eyes are like the sky before a storm—a wealth of pain painted in every shade of grey. “You come to me when Hunk’s done something to break your heart again. And I,” Shiro swallows hard, looks away again. “I can’t do that anymore.”

Lance blinks again, stunned into silence—his best defense deserting him in his confusion. “You always knew what this was about,” he says soft and gentle. Then laughs light and only a little mocking. “It’s not like you weren’t playing pretend. That you wouldn’t come find _me_ when you saw a certain ring on a silver chain—far too small for Hunk’s fingers. Or a sword with a grip that doesn’t fit either of our hands? It’s a game of reciprocal exchange, Shirogane. You can’t say it wasn’t.”

That righteous jaw tightens, a vein jumping along his corded neck, and Lance knows he’s caught him as easily as a fish in a sleepy river. “I didn’t mean…”

“Lying!” Lance sings, and then twines his arms around Shiro’s neck, smiling at his blinking surprise. “But I don’t mind. You can lie to me when you need.”

He doesn’t jump when the glaive falls with a ringing clatter, large hands holding his hips with bruising strength. “I’m not lying to you,” Shiro growls at him, sincerity and frustration turning his voice into a throbbing force that Lance can feel rattle his ribs where he presses tight against that powerful chest. “I have never lied to you.”

Lance rolls his eyes at Shiro, runs his hands through the close shorn hair at his nape, and smiles sweetly. “Lying,” he sings again, soft and sweet as if whispering endearments. “But I think you tell me lies because you tell them to yourself.”

He shivers delicately when Shiro’s hands flex around him—irritation made manifest before Shiro can wrestle his emotions back under the aegis of his ruthless disciple. “Why are you like this?” Shiro asks—less to Lance himself, he feels, but more to the universe at large. Asking the powers that be why they wrought something like Lance and then let him lose in Shiro’s life. As if Lance were a force, an event, a thing to be born regardless of Shiro’s feelings on the matter. “Why can’t you trust me?”

And there it is again, the despair so rich and deep that it threatens to overwhelm him like a skiff in deep sea storm. Despairs of Shiro so completely that he can’t help but catch that blunt jaw with one hand and kiss him until there’s no breath left in either one of them. “You should know better,” Lance says, voice gone breathless and wet around the edges. “You should’ve known better.”

Shiro catches at his shoulders, hand fumbling between them where Lance presses the slender knife made of glass and silver—too pretty and delicate a thing to be so deadly—through the midnight armour, past its steel and magic, through to that ever-earnest heart. He lowers that powerful body, gone weak and limp with the shock of betrayal, to the marble floors. 

Presses his forehead to the white forelock, a kiss upon a fevered brow, and weeps softly. “You should’ve known better.”

“Lance?” The question is soft and fond and makes every part of his heart break into pieces left to be ground into dust by his own gnawing guilt.

“The spell only works if something equal is given in exchange,” he explains—voice shattering into jagged pieces. 

Understanding dawns across Shiro’s face, horrified and accepting. Lance’s hands and thorn are slick. He folds himself tight to Shiro, presses down, down, down and keeps his cheek pressed to that soft, short shorn hair. Feels it as breath stutters, struggles against lungs filling with a liquid that should never be there, and finally dies.

Presses tight to that still body and gives himself a moment, gives himself fifty, to cry and cry and cry as if he would never know how to do anything else. 

And then he stands.

Pulls his glass and silver thorn free, considers the crimson that fills its finely crafted blade. Heart’s blood made more precious by the one who drew it.

The door swings open before he can even place a hand upon it. 

XX. This Is The Truth You Use To Break Them

Lance stands on the edge of the chessboard and counts the squares—black and white, white and black—as he counts his heartbeats, wondering if these will be his last. He’s never been on the board without his lance (get it? Lance has a lance. The joke was old before it was ever told) and feels naked, vulnerable, without it. He’s a shabby little thing out of his midnight armour, tired eyes and shaking hands.

But he holds the casket made of silver and rubies, surprisingly light in his grasp for all the things he’s done to win it. He doesn’t let himself think of 

the lies he’s told _(lying through his teeth with a sweet smile and clear eyes)_ ;

the schemes he’s spun (desperate plans crafted by desperate minds that must, this time, succeed because failure, oh failure, would be the end and he will never stop, not while Hunk walks these halls with icy eyes and a touch like death);

the blood he’s spilled _(his blood leaking between his splayed fingers—heartbeat thundering in his ears, the other boy’s blood staining his hands, his jacket, his soul, and he’s sorry, sorry, so sorry)_ ;

the lives he’s claimed _(all he can feel is pity, endless pity, for this poor broken creature—face marred with a scar as white as his hair, arm a twisted parody of flesh—but he needs to open that door, walk into that forest, and no tormented guard will bar his way)_ ;

all to collect this little trinket box made of precious stone and metal wrought in pleasing form, the box worth less than dirt compared to the treasure it houses. He longs to open it, to crack it apart piece by glittering piece, to gaze on his prize, but if he does the spell would shatter and the chance lost. And he only gets this once—the moment caught between heartbeats.

Lance feels before he hears Hunk’s heavy tread across the board. His footsteps like the heartbeat of some great beast. He’s beautiful, Lance thinks, even like this. His hair grown as long as any woman’s, caught in thick braids cast through with silver and delicate opals. His broad shoulders clad in silks and leather. Once Lance would have paid any sum to see him dressed like this—like he’s walked out of some fantasy of sweetly seductive vampires and spirits—and now Lance would cut out his own tongue to have him back in his tattered shorts and oil-stained shirts. 

Hunk steps so close to him that Lance can feel his breath ghost across his skin like the promise of a kiss. He fights not to tremble. He does anyway.

“You did not truly think that you would succeed, did you?” he asks, the question echoes across time—pulling at the weft and fold of realities like a child with a string. Lance can hear how it rattles through the years, endlessly repeated out of different mouths—each of them different and all of them the same.

He looks up into those dark, dark eyes—darker than midnight, darker than the deeds he’s done in this place—and feels his lips twist to answer. The answer bubbles up out of his throat lighter than air, clearer than bells. “I did, actually.”

His answer spills into the narrow space between them, words chiming against each other, ringing in the silence. Those were not the words that the story demanded. That was not the way this tale was to be told, and yet they hung in the air between them like he could reach out and snatch them back. 

Lance holds up the box between them, a smile curving his lips, a memory of different days. “I brought you something.”

Hunk pulls away from him as if burned, as if driven back by unseen hands. Lance follows him, pressing the little casket of silver and rubies into those broad hands. Hunk grabs it reflexively, eyes wide and wild.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Lance asks, a hint of teasing riding his voice. “It’s even your birthday.”

He watches that strong throat swallow convulsively, as if choking. Lance wraps his fingers around Hunk’s, slender and calloused against thick and gnarled, feels his warmth leach slowly into those big hands. He presses Hunk’s fingers, down, down, down until the latching mechanism releases with a whisper of a pop. 

Lance had expected perhaps an explosion of light, radiant and glowing. Or maybe a burst of song so beautiful that the soul aches at it. Or a seeping warmth across their joined hands like the touch of mortal sunlight that he’s long since forgotten. But the casket’s lid falls with only a whisper of a sigh and Hunk is slipping to his knees weeping, weeping, weeping. 

The heart that beats within their palms is a tiny thing, hardly bigger than a bird, but within its frantic pulse is a rage that burns up his arms like a shockwave. Lance closes their hands over that furiously beating heart and presses them gently, so gently, to Hunk’s heaving chest. Their fingers pass through flesh and bone, burning like a star springing to life, to nestle that tiny bundle of fury and love behind glacier-cold ribs. And as Hunk shrieks and wails as heat explodes across his ghost-frozen body Lance carefully gathers him into his arms. Cradles him as close as death. 

Presses sugar-sweet kisses to Hunk’s fevered brow as he screams and rages. Runs calloused fingers through sweat-soaked locks as fae-ice is forced to relinquish its hold in his veins, his muscles, his very bones. Sings quiet songs sung by children under the mortal sun until Hunk goes soft and still in his arms, breath shuddering in great heaves like a storm at sea.

Slowly, so slowly, with a universe’s worth of wasted moments hanging between them, Hunk raises his face to Lance’s and allows the gentle press of lips with the softest of sighs. Thick fingers find his face, trace the high cheek bones and the swell of lips with wonder. 

“I love you,” Hunk says at the same time as the words burst unbidden from Lance’s lips. Hunk presses their foreheads together and says softer than snow melting, softer than the first touch of spring. “What does it matter that no snowflake falls the same way—that no one has ever loved as we love—when all things fail?” It sounds like something repeated. Something in the shape of the words pulls at the edges of Lance’s memory. When Hunk opens his dark, dark eyes they burn with the fury of a heart too long denied. “Because _all things eventually fail_.” 

Lance laughs and laughs and laughs. They remember now, he and Hunk, they remember all the bits and pieces torn from them and hidden in the shadows. He laughs with desperate joy. He laughs with bitter fury. He laughs and pulls his lover to his feet as the first crinkle-crack snaps across the chessboard—black and white, white and black—like the crack of a whip. Because Lance knows, as Hunk knows, as every mortal who has served as a chess piece knows, that the heartless creatures they’ve made their masters may be as old as the stars, but they are not older. 

They stand at the center of the board heedless of its shattering—pieces fragmenting into nothing, dissolving into the void—with eyes only for each other. It’s been years, decades, centuries since they’ve stood this way. It’s been the briefest of heartbeats.

If Haggar curses their names, if Allura screams desperate threats, they don’t hear it. All that they hear is a steady heartbeat in time with another—a thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump until they become one. The board breaks into a million pieces around them, voices cry out in terror and jubilation, but all they hear is the softest of breath breaking across soft skin. 

Chess mistresses and masters rant and rage on the edges of the board before endlessness of the void opens around them, but the still, small figures left on the board don’t turn to witness their fall. For they already know that all things eventually fail. Eventually, eventually, after a thousand, thousand, thousand snowflakes fall there comes the avalanche. 

If the Fair Folk have seen every love and know every way it is possible to crack open a fragile mortal heart until it destroys itself. Then they also know that eventually every power reveals its weakness—a flaw so small that a snowflake can break it all apart. 

When the end sweeps across them it comes with a delicate, trembling kiss.


	3. Seven Nation Army March

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I hate soul mate AUs. This fic was going to be me taking a baseball bat to the entire idea. But just never could get invested enough to really get going because Langst. Meh.

7 Nation Army (the words bleed from me)

Lance tries not to twitch under the cool fingers that run along his spine—light and sure as they trace the mark that sits between his shoulder blades like a brand, a beacon of all the things he can’t have. He buries his head in his folded arms and forces himself to breathe slow and deep as the artist makes a thoughtful hum above him. She spreads her hands over the width of his back, palms at his spine, fingers splayed over the muscles of his shoulders. 

“This is a large cover-up, Paladin,” she murmurs, and in the unsettled, flickering light of her shop her husky voice is a mockery of a lover’s whisper. 

Lance makes an affirmative sound in the back of his throat. Alien booze and old feelings steal his voice, chokes it in his throat like a fist over his windpipe. He knows it’s a big cover up—shoulder to shoulder, nape to hip—his soulmark is the biggest he or anyone he knows has ever seen. It takes up so much space, so much skin, so much of his mind, so much of his time. It’s huge, and heavy, and he drowns under its weight. He wants it gone. If he can’t cut it off his skin, he’ll cover it over like paint over old wallpaper—imperfect and cracking.

The artist sighs, ghosts her hands over his back and he can’t suppress the shiver it draws from him. “It will be expensive.”

That makes him laugh, low and only a little bitter. “No discounts for a defender of the universe? What’s the going rate of freeing a planet these days?”

She laughs, a surprisingly high and girlish sound, and it makes him grin despite his self-absorbed mood and uneven temper. “Well,” she replies, drawing out the vowel and he can hear the grin in her voice. “I suppose we can negotiate something.”

“One free tattoo for ten planets saved?” he suggests, not bothering to look up as her fingers continue to drift up and down his spine. “Save twenty for a special reward?”

That pulls another high, giggling laugh out her before she heaves a sigh and he knows before she says anything the fight that’s about to happen. “This is a soulmark,” she says without preamble or delicacy—just a swift one-two punch of honesty. “And you want me to cover it up.”

“It’s unrequited,” he says and his voice is as flat as the plains.

“You are drunk,” the artist starts, her hands still and cool against his skin. They feel like the reality check he refuses to take for himself. He’s not really the impulse guy—that’s Keith’s entire *thing*, part and parcel, on his gravestone it’ll probably read “here lies a dumb fucker who couldn’t think two seconds before flinging himself off a cliff,” or into a Galra cruiser with re-enforced shields because Keith Kogane has more suicidal tendencies than a beach has grains of sand—but he’s allowing himself to be impulsive today.

“And it’s still unrequited,” he says and even to his own ears his voice sounds tired. “Drunk or sober, it’s still unrequited. So it doesn’t matter, does it?”

The breath the artist blows out is long and rattling, her fingers run up and down his back, tracing signs he can only guess at. Lance thinks she’s maybe forgotten she’s even doing it. “Some races don’t have soulmates, did you know that?” she asks quietly, as if sharing a secret. “They just have to figure out love and romance and heartbreak the old-fashioned way. Almost makes soulmates feel like cheating.”

The alcohol in his system, her cool hands moving in random patterns across his back, the flickering neon spilling across the meticulously sterilized tile of her studio lends the evening a surreal cast—as if he’d stepped into a cyberpunk noir. He makes a low noise in the back of his throat. “The Galra, for example?”

“Among many, many others,” she answers as her hands still their paths over the sweep and spill of his soul mark. “Someone would argue you are throwing away an incredible gift.”

Lance turns his face into his arms and groans. He’s been having this argument for months—years at this point—with Hunk, with his mama, with his own stupid romantic heart. Even unrequited a soul mark is a gift, a chance, and opportunity not to be wasted says every piece of romantic logic, every movie made for tender hearts to sigh and tremble at, every piece of advice given to the lovelorn. Hell, it’s advice he’s pretty sure he’s given himself before he’d had the awful, gut wrenching, blood chilling realization that he’s the dumb fucker with not one but two unrequited marks painting his skin in lurid red, orange, and black. 

Things take a real different fucking cast when you’re the one the universe has, for some fucking reason, decided to play a massive practical joke on.

And that’s all Lance can think this is. A practical joke designed by the powers that be: take one boy—make him a ridiculously overly-dramatic romantic—give him two unrequited soulmarks, and then stick him in a flying fairy ship with magical semi-sentient robot lions with said not-soulmates. Shake well. Laugh. 

One day Lance is gonna find the fucker that thought this one up and take a baseball bat to their fucking *knees*.

But that’s not an option right now, so he sighs slow and tired. “It’s unrequited,” he repeats again, because maybe if he says it for the fifty millionth time it’ll sink through his own dumb head.

She tickles his sides until he rolls over to stare up into her mis-matched eyes—one a deep cobalt blue and the other an eight-irised whirling mechanical contraption that is both very cool and very freaky. “It’s still a possibility. A choice.”

He catches her fingers with their blue tips in his hands and leans his head back against the questionable comfort of the medical stretcher she’s got him spread out across. “And I’m making that choice.”

She cocks her head to the side, dark hair falling across her face like shadows and ink, but she doesn’t tug her hands from his grip. When she opens her mouth, to argue, to feed him another platitude, say something profound and wise like he hasn’t heard it a million times from Hunk, he squeezes her hands hard enough that the fine bones there grind against each other and her breath catches in her throat. “Stubborn,” she chides. “But I’m still not tattooing you while you are drunk.”

She laughs at the face he makes at her. “So this was a waste of time,” he grumbles as he starts to lever himself up. He doesn’t want to find a different artist—she’d been recommended by literally every sentient being with a thing for art and pain and he wants her designs on his skin like he wants precious little else. (Let’s himself want precious little else.) “Sorry.”

“So hasty,” she murmurs as she wraps delicate, slender fingers around his wrists. “Come back to me in the morning and ask again.”

Lance looks at where she holds his wrists with the sea’s own strength in her fragile fingers and then smiles at her slow. “Come back?” he asks carefully, as if testing the concept and finding it wanting. “You sure you don’t want to keep an eye on me? I *am* drunk, and prone to making bad decisions.”

She’s still laughing when he tugs her into his lap and swallows down her giggles like wine.

\--

The morning steals across her studio slowly, carefully, like a lover found right before bar time that will never know your name. Lance scrubs his face with one hand and counts out his breath in time with his lover’s heartbeats, slow and steady where she lies draped across his chest. He’s courting a massive lecture from Shiro when he finally hauls his sorry carcass back to the castle. But he finds himself petting the smooth grey skin of his artist’s back, fingers catching along the delicate nobs of her spine, instead of hauling his sorry ass up and back to the castle like a good boy.

He can feel the moment she drifts into wakefulness, as slow and easy as an afternoon tide. 

\--

Lance swears angrily as he reaches his arm behind himself, trying in frustrated futility to swipe the healing gel across the last spot along his spine. His new tattoo itches and burns like the worst mosquito bite right where he can’t quite get his hand. Groaning, he gives up and glowers at the tub of gel where it sits on the low table in front of him. Not for the first time and not for the last he wishes that Hunk would stop being a melodramatic jackass about the entire damned thing and just help him rub the healing gel across the tattoo. Does Hunk *want* him to get infection?

He doesn’t hear the infirmary doors slide open over his own furious profanity. Not that any of the doors on the castle really make much sound—the entire place is a ninja’s wet dream, which no wonder Keith loves it so much.

“Well,” Keith says from the doorway, amusement in his voice and in the subtle curl of his smile—speak of the devil, Lance thinks to himself, and he will appear—“that certainly demonstrates the flexibility of the word fuck.”

Lance shoots Keith a dry look over his shoulder—tension climbing up his spine like frost up a window; this is conversation he cannot imagine going well—and shrugs. “New tattoo, itches like a bitch.”

The look the blooms on Keith’s face is a complicated mess of longing, confusion, and rage. Watching the slow comprehension dawn across Keith’s fine-boned features like a winter morning, Lance realizes with a start that Keith’s *seen* his soulmark before, during that long terrible week of running from Zarkon with no idea of how the evil sonuvabitch managed to keep finding them. Keith had stared at the wings of fire that burned like a brand across Lance’s back with a blank expression bare of any recognition. Keith’d seen Lance’s mark in all its melodramatic glory and not known it for it was. 

In retrospect, Lance thinks, that’d kinda been the final, final, *final* nail in the coffin of the entire ill-fated enterprise. The final punchline in the cosmic joke that was his soulmark and subsequent lack of relationships.

It’s a credit to the Blades of Mamora, Lance thinks, when Keith drags in a deep and rattling inhale, holds it for a long heartbeat, and then breathes it back out. His face settles into carefully neutral lines before he speaks in slow, measured tones: “You have a tattoo.”

“Yep,” Lance says, and carefully keeps from making the ‘p’ pop with the force of his exhale. “I do.”

“On your back,” Keith continues as if Lance hadn’t said anything at all, and man wasn’t that just their ongoing relationship, or lack of one, in a nutshell. “Right over your soulmark.”

Lance cocks his head and stares up into Keith’s unfairly pretty eyes, trying to read the expression there, but Keith’s got his expression schooled into soldier-blankness. “Yeah, that’s about right.”

“You covered up your *soul mark*,” Keith repeats as if by phrasing the facts in some new formation he’ll get Lance to laugh and admit to some sort of elaborate prank.

“Yep. That’s what I did,” Lance agrees and watches with mute fascination as colour blooms across Keith’s cheeks like a red tide—furious and twice as deadly. Or at least deadly for him in the immediate sense. He wonders if Keith will actually punch him.

Keith blows out a hard breath, turns on his heels and stalks away, hands raking up and through his hair, making it wilder than ever. “That’s why Hunk’s so angry with you.”

“Yeah, big guy’s a ridiculous romantic,” Lance says with a little ‘what-can-you-do’ shrug.

“*You’re* a ridiculous romantic,” Keith counters—confusion evident across every line of his body.

“Maybe,” Lance allows. “But I do eventually learn from my mistakes—if my face is smashed into them often enough.”

Keith stares at him in mute incomprehension. “How can having a soul mark be a mistake?”

“When they are unrequited,” Lance answers—feeling hysterical laughter build low in his gut. Somewhere some god really, really hated him to stick him this situation. Explaining to his unrequited soulmate the precise and awful majesty of his marks while desperately trying to keep him from realizing the full extent of the cosmic joke.


	4. Game Of Life Is Hard To Play (gonna lose it anyway)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Otherwise known as 'sniper!Lance' story that I started writing before s5 actually gave us Lance with a sniper rifle and then did nothing with it. I'm not sure where I was going with this anymore. Something something Matt makes bad decisions with tech. something something Narti is an AI inside Lance's head. something something I read way too much hard sci-fi.

Game Of Life Is Hard To Play (gonna lose it anyway)

**Use of Weapons**

There’s a fine tremble working its way through his hands—spiderwebbing from his palms, up his fingers, down his wrists, until everything from his elbows to his fingertips shake with delicate shivers. Lance raises his hand in front of his face to watch, mute and fascinated, as his hand shakes so hard it looks like the onset of a seizure or the start of a stroke. 

Something massive and catastrophically fatal.

Like the fight on Naxzela, over Haggar’s cruiser, over a third of the known-universe. Massive and catastrophically fatal for so, so, so impossibly many. The shivers move their way up his arms to shoulders, down his back, and he sits in Red’s cockpit as left-over adrenaline and terror work their way through him like a drug.

 _Elevated arginine-8-vasopressin_ , his armor’s biometric scanners tell him.

 _Abnormal 5-hydroxytryptamine production_ , it says.

 _Eminent failure of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal complex_ , it says.

Shock, Lance thinks and remembers his abuelo sitting still and distant, staring off at something only he could see. Battle fatigue. PTSD. He scrubs his hands over his face hard enough to make stars burst behind his eyelids. Well, he thinks to himself, they’re all going to have PTSD now.

Red pushes against his mind, an insistent and worried demand for attention, and just behind her he can feel Blue’s curiosity and concern. It’s a bit much, slightly overwhelming, to be the center of their attention like this—two massive, ancient, alien presences inside his head like eldritch goddesses, but he’s getting used to it. Lance’s found he can get used to a great many things. Adaptability, the center-piece of humanity’s abilities, seems to be a virtue he has in spades. 

Lance lifts his hands from his face and holds them up again. Watches as the tremors up his arm slow into small shivers again, a delicate tremble, until he can clench his hands into fists and draw in a breath that doesn’t sound like ragged panting.

A sudden burst of the castle’s bright, white light leaves him stunned and blinking at the intruder into Red’s cockpit.

Keith stands frozen at Red’s entrance, eyes wide and startled. “I’m sorry,” he stutters out as Lance stares at him, bemused. “I thought you were with the others.”

He’s very pale in his space ninja suit, Lance thinks. Pale and small and fragile in ways that Lance has never really considered before. An infinitely breakable thing of delicate flesh and bone wrapped in midnight armor that would never really protect him from his own self-destructive tendencies.

They almost lost this, Lance thinks. The universe almost lost this bundle of ferocious loyalty and determination. It’s only sheer, dumb luck that kept them from having a Keith-sized hole in space-time and that’s a thing Lance finds hard to square. It’s like a chemical equation that refuses to balance correctly. Lance spreads the variables out in his mind, five lions plus six pilots plus one super-secret space ninja organization plus one scrappy rebellion was somehow supposed to equal the end of an empire that had been ruling for thousands of years.

Without any unacceptable subtractions.

It’s not until Keith fidgets minutely, awkward and uncomfortable, that Lance realizes he’s been silent for entirely too long. Any silence, he realizes with a jolt, from him would seem strange to Keith. An abnormality of behavior, a glitch in behavioral code, leaving Keith stumbling and uncertain. Lance rubs his face again and yanks off his helmet before his armor can tell him in any more detail about his impending mental breakdown.

“Just chilling with one of my favorite ladies,” he says in poor facsimile of his normal breezy banter. He leverages himself out Red’s pilot seat with a muffled groan. Every part of him complains at the movement and he feels like his abuelo. Twisted and strained by war. Lance claps Keith on the shoulder, jostling him just a little. “You take over.”

“No, I mean—” Keith says, words stumbling over themselves as he tries to walk himself back out of Red’s cockpit. “I’m not gonna chase you out.”

Lance stops and raises one eyebrow at Keith until he flushes slightly. “She’s your lion now,” Keith says without looking at him. “I shouldn’t—”

Lance shakes him by the shoulder hard enough to make the words die in Keith’s mouth. “You take over,” he repeats. “She’s missed you.”

“I, uh,” Keith’s protest stutters to a stop at Lance’s annoyed sigh. “Okay.”

Lance pats his shoulder like you would an obedient puppy and laughs softly at Keith’s expressive eyeroll. He pretends he doesn’t hear Keith’s softly whispered words of affection for Red and smiles as he feels her presence light up with a fierce and possessive joy. He shifts things around in his mental arrangement of that equation: 5 lions, 6 pilots, 1 space ninja-spy organization, 1 rebellion, equals 1 dead empire. 

He’s still moving pieces around in his head, as if it were one of those three dimensional puzzles his nephews used to love back on Earth, as he makes his way to the common room. Plays with that equation like it was a bit of Garrison physics homework. No big deal. Not like the entire fate of the universe depended upon finding a way to solve it.

He sheds bits of his armor as he goes. Hunk’ll grump at him later for being a mess, but he can neither stand to be weighed down with all the trappings of a Defender of the Universe for a second longer nor can he find the energy to pick up his mess. 

Lance feels like he’s got six thousand pieces of puzzle to figure out and every one of them is a bit of sky. 

Pidge hits his back like a missile made of brilliance and teenaged girl. Her arms are steel bands around his middle and he can feel them shake like the tremors that left him rattling in Red’s cockpit. He wraps his fingers around her hands where they fist over his belly. She rubs her head against his back, her entire face mashed against him, and shakes. 

Lance looks down at where her hands try to fist themselves in the fabric of his undersuit, but it’s too tight, too form-fitting, to allow for such a comfort. He runs a thumb along the delicate bones of her knuckles and thinks of her fingers moving fast as lightening over computer keys. 

They almost lost this too, he thinks. The universe almost lost all this bright-burning genius, so clever that the very laws of physics were merely mild obstacles to be overcome. Sheer, dumb luck kept them from losing all this in a fireball of some mad witch’s making. He presses his thumbs across the backs of her hands and feels each bump of the delicate bones there. The equation in his head, the puzzle in his mind, shifts again as he tries to balance it all out. 

“Keith’s talking to Red,” he says into the pressing silence of the hallway.

“That’s good,” Pidge’s voice is muffled against his back. He pretends it masks the way her voice is kinda wet and shaky. “About time.”

Lance hums in agreement. He’s not sure how long they stand there in the service hallway off Red’s hanger. Long enough that Pidge’s shivers subside, and her hands slowly unknot themselves until she can splay her fingers across his stomach, rising and falling with his every breath. 

The sound of shoes skidding along the ice-slick metal of the hallway and a small thump and _whoof_ of breath makes Lance look up in time to see Allura reorient herself from where she’s bounced off the corner of the hallway and launch herself at him. He braces and catches her in time to keep them all from going down in an undignified tumble. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and buries her face against crook of his neck. He keeps one hand wrapped around Pidge’s, fingers slotting together like a lock, and fits the other across Allura’s back.

“Blue says that you—” Allura begins and then gives a breathless squeak as he squeezes her.

“Problem about sharing a lion,” he says into her hair. “They are terrible tattle-tales.”

Allura laughs against his neck and he pretends like he doesn’t feel wetness on her cheeks. “They really are,” she agrees. “Gossips, the lot of them.”

He can feel her drop one hand to the top of Pidge’s head where she stays with her face determinedly smashed into his back. He thinks he can feel her card her fingers through Pidge’s nightmare tangle of wheat blonde hair. 

They almost lost this as well, he thinks with a storm of rage growing inside him. The universe almost lost this woman made of literal magic and beauty. And that was unacceptable along any metric that he could think to apply. If he’s not careful to focus on her steady breathing, on the soft back and forth of her teasing banter with Pidge where they have him trapped between them, he can still hear her pained scream ringing in his ears.

Lance lays out that equation again and again and again. There’s away to balance it out, he knows, without any unacceptable subtractions. 

There’s a way to solve the puzzle even when all he has are a million pieces of sky. There has to be.

“Lance!” Hunk’s annoyed shout jolts all of them, peeling them apart like the petals of an unfurling flower. “Why are you like this?” Hunk asks as he brandishes a piece of Lance’s armor at them like a stick. “Why?”

Lance cocks his head to one side, but keeps his fingers tangled with Pidge’s on his stomach, his arm locked around Allura’s waist. “Do you want that list chronologically or by order of importance?” he asks.

Hunk makes a face at him. “Shameless,” he says. “That’s what you are. Is it group hug time?”

Allura wordless opens one arm to him and Hunk drops Lance’s armor like so much forgotten detritus. He bundles them all against himself and squeezes them hard until they all complain, breathless and laughing. Lance tucks his head under Hunk’s chin and butts against him like a cat demanding pets. He breathes in Hunk’s scent—machine oil, sweat and spices, a smell he’d know at the death of the universe—and lets Hunk’s deep belly laugh wash over him like the waves on Varadero. 

They almost lost this, too, he thinks, and the storm of rage mutates into something icy and murderous. A tempest on a northern sea. The universe almost lost the greatest mechanical genius of their generation and it’s only stupid luck that prevented it. A sudden switch of enemy allegiances. A one-time trick that could never be repeated. And that. That’s unacceptable, he decides.

He rubs a hand over Allura’s back, runs his thumb across Pidge’s knuckles, turns his face into Hunk’s collarbones and thinks of Keith standing pale and unsure in Red’s cockpit. He thinks of the infinitely mortal equation they present, so easily rent asunder by vicious subtraction. He thinks of a universe with a Keith-sized hole punched into the weave of space and time as easily as a Galra fighter could fly. He thinks of a universe missing all the magic and brilliance bundled into his arms.

And he thinks: _no_.

There’s a soft sound, a tiny cough, a sound of awkwardness and discomfort that drags Lance’s attention from his own increasingly homicidal line of thinking to where Shiro stands at the end of hallway watching the tangle of them with something very like longing stamped across his face. That expression, the soft vulnerability of it, vanishes the second Shiro notices Lance watching him—tucked away behind a smile that doesn’t reach Shiro’s tired eyes.

And that’s a gulf that Lance doesn’t know how to breach. A chasm he can’t seem to figure out how to bridge between the team and Shiro. A distance forged and maintained by Shiro’s own demands of professionalism. A sense of professionalism, Lance thinks, that probably doesn’t approve of the current messy tangle of limbs that is four-fifths of Voltron. He gently pulls away from Hunk, untangles himself from Pidge’s grasp, and slides out of Allura’s arms. 

Hunk makes a confused sound until he notices Shiro and shifts so he’s standing shoulder to shoulder with Lance. Allura slides one hand down Lance’s arm until she can fit their fingers together, palm against palm. Pidge eels between Hunk and Lance until she’s planted in front of them—chin up and shoulders back and Lance wonders exactly what she’s set to defend against.

“Lotor’s requesting docking privileges at the Castle,” Shiro starts, and Lance notes how he shifts to come to attention—hands behind his back, gaze fixed somewhere just over their collective heads. They just came out of the fight of their lives, a fight close even by their worryingly low standards, and Shiro’s right back at the grind stone. Lance isn’t sure he wants to laugh or shake the man until his teeth rattle out. The equation inside his head shifts, adds a function for trust and separates out their Black Paladin. “And we ne—.”

“No,” Allura says firmly enough to startle all of them into silence. “He is not coming onto the Castle.”

“Princess,” Shiro says, tired and frustrated.

“It’s my castle, paladin,” she says quietly, command in every syllable. “And I will not have him on it. Besides, we must wait for Kolivan and the leadership of the rebellion. This is an _alliance_ , and we will make these decisions in consultation with our allies.”

Shiro’s mouth snaps closed and he nods, expression thoughtful. Lance squeezes Allura’s hand where he can feel it tremble in his grasp. She squeezes back gently. 

“Keith’s talking to Red,” Lance says, trying to redirect the conversation. There’s some sort of fight brewing between them, even if he doesn’t understand the basis of it, he can feel the rising tension. “You should probably go talk to him.”

Shiro looks down the hallway towards Red’s hanger, mouth twisted emotions that Lance can only guess at. 

“If he’s talking to Red,” Shiro murmurs, soft and hesitant. Lance plays with the equation inside his head a little more—adds their Red Paladin to their Black Paladin inside the trust function and finds it almost, _almost_ balances. “I’m not sure I should interrupt.”

Lance swallows the sigh that wants to bubble out his mouth. Sometimes he really doesn’t know what goes on inside their Black Paladin’s head, but he’s got limited capacity to wade through all of Shiro’s defenses. Which is why he’s got no shame about taking the ongoing problem of Shiro and all his attendant issues and lobbing them right at Keith. 

Lance glances at Hunk before making his way down the hallway, tugging Allura along behind him—unwilling to let her go even for a moment—and pats Shiro on the shoulder as they slide around him. “I think he could use some time with his best friend,” Lance says softly, smile as sweet and disarming as he can make it. “It’s been a really, uh, trying day for him. You know?”

He can see the second the guilt-trip takes hold in the way that Shiro looks down at his hands and then back down towards Red’s hanger. Allura reaches out and pats his shoulder as well, dragging his attention to her where she smiles at him as charming as you please. And Lance has to bite the inside of his mouth. Shameless, he thinks, they are _shameless_ in their manipulativeness. 

“We may not have time once everyone arrives,” she says gently. “Best to take this time now, yes?”

Shiro regards them with a tight expression that Lance can’t quite interpret, but he bets that neither he nor Allura are quite as subtle as they think they are. But fortunately for them, neither is Shiro.

“You’ll call us once the rest of the alliance leaders arrive,” Shiro not quite demands.

Lance flips him a little two finger salute and grins, beneficent in his victory. “Of course, bossman.”

Shiro sighs at him, but Allura is already dragging him down the hallway as Hunk hustles after them, loudly demanding that Lance carry his own damned armor. 

He sees Pidge catch Shiro for a moment and talk to him, low and insistent, for a brief moment before she follows along in Hunk’s wake. He raises his eyebrows at her and she gives him a small shrug and eyeroll in response. He’d almost feel bad for the way that they gang up on Shiro, except for the fact that the man never listens to anyone ever unless they present a united front and overwhelm him. 

He shifts the mortal equation of their rebellion and sets another trust function until the whole thing reads like the most demented set of nested functions a mathematician ever thought up: t(bp+rp│yp+〖bp〗^2+gp)+s(rp+bm)+f(rb)= lim┬(t-10000)ge 

The entire thing gives Lance a headache. He wonders if he’s taxing a metaphor to the point of breaking, beating a dead horse, yada yada. But the basic math of it won’t leave him alone. There’s a certain undeniable logic of the situation that refuses to resolve. A fundamental error in their current formation that keeps returning that unacceptable subtraction, at least if there’s no moment of deus ex disaffected princeling. 

He follows along in Allura’s wake and plays with the equation until a headache beats behind his eyes in time with his heartbeat. He resists the urge to rub at his eyes and give away his anxiety. Leave the math to Pidge, Keith’d said. And maybe he should when all he’s really doing is giving himself the mother of all headaches.

Only he’s pretty sure he knows what order of operations needs to occur to make the equation balance—where the acceptable subtraction resides. 

Lance looks at where Allura has his hand in a white-knuckled grip and wonders if he’s got the emotional fortitude to do what needed to be done. 

They end up piling into the kitchen with the communicator left on loud in case any of the alliance leaders need them right the fuck now, but it’s only Matt cracking bad math puns that make Hunk cackle and Pidge groan. He leans against the counter and fits Allura into the curve of his arms just to feel her laugh. He buries his face in her hair, curling around her like a shawl made of teenaged boy, and lets her reach back to card her fingers through his hair.

“Disgusting,” Pidge announces as a grin pulls at her mouth and makes the corner of her eyes crinkle. 

Hunk glances at them over his shoulder as he conducts alchemical experiments that will, through processes that flat baffle Lance, turn into tasty food and smiles at them. “Nah, they’re cute.”

Allura squirms in his arms, embarrassed, but when he opens them for her to leave she catches his hands with a huff and tugs his arms back around her. She locks her fingers around his wrists and presses down, trapping him with the prettiest handcuffs in the universe. He tucks his face against her neck to hide the way a grin threatens to break his entire face.

“Disgusting,” Pidge says again. “Completely shameless, the way he lets himself be owned like that.”

Allura curls her fingers in his hair and pulls until she can look him in the eyes. A pleased, smug smile curls to show the dainty points of fangs and something hot and breathless burns through him. “Do I own you?” She asks, head cocked like the universe’s loveliest predator. 

“Yeah,” he agrees, just a whisper of sound, but her smile grows into something gorgeous and vicious while Pidge makes gagging noises in the background before giggling her head off.

“Aww,” says Matt, voice tinny and echoing oddly despite the quantum entanglement communications array he and Pidge and Hunk had managed to think up in a single afternoon—was there anyone more brilliant than his friends? Lance didn’t think so—but still obviously amused and affectionate. “Listen to the new lovebirds.”

“New lovebirds?” Hunk asks, turning to stare at the ceiling as if Matt could see him turn for an explanation. “Who are the old lovebirds?”

Pidge cracks up so hard she doubles over, giggles whistling out of her between gasps of air. Leftover adrenaline bleeding out of her through laughter over a joke that’s not even close to being funny. Allura squirms free one arm to sooth a hand up and down her Green Paladin’s spine, a fond smile rending her face soft and beautiful.

“Really, dude?” Lance asks, arms still snug around Allura’s waist as if he’d been born to fit there. “You want to think about that statement maybe a little?”

Hunk looks at him for a long, long breath while both Holt siblings hiccup out giggles. Lance presses his forehead against Allura’s shoulder when he all but sees the lightbulb go off over his best friend’s head with an audible _ding!_ of realization. “Oh. That, uh, that makes so many things make so much more sense,” Hunk says thoughtfully. “Huh.”

Lance presses his cheek against Allura’s shoulder and thinks that this, this kitchen full of light and laughter, might be the closest thing he ever gets to grace. Closes his eyes and just lets the laughter and teasing flow over him like warm water over old wounds. For a moment he can almost pretend he’s back in Cuba, surrounded by family with the waves of his ocean just meters from the door. Swats at Pidge’s hand when she pokes his cheeks, grinning, loose and happy in ways he’s not sure he’s ever seen her before.

There’s a lot he’s willing to do, Lance decides, to protect this. 

“You’re being unusually quiet,” Hunk says and pokes his forehead. “What’s going on in there?”

Lance shrugs, not bothering to move from where Allura has him pinned against the counter. “Nothing much,” he says. “Just happy, I guess.”

Hunk hums at him and gives him a narrow-eyed look that promises a Conversation later, but Lance can’t find it within himself to be particularly fussed about his impending interrogation. “Go get Shiro and Keith,” Hunk tells him. “Food’s ready.”

Lance turns his face into Allura’s hair, hiding in her wild mane, and makes a low whining noise. “Just call them on the comms,” he says, voice muffled by Allura’s shoulder. “Make Pidge do it. I don’t know. I’m comfy.”

Allura strokes her fingers through his hair, nails lightly scratching his scalp until he purrs with it. “I think we can just save some for them when they finally discover their appetite,” she tells Hunk. “They have a lot to discuss.”

And this? This is why Allura is his favorite. He snuggles closer and peeks out from the curtain of Allura’s hair to give Hunk big, pleading eyes. Hunk waves a spatula at the pair of them. “You spoil him,” he tells Allura. “You get to deal with him once you’ve broken all his training.”

Pidge laughs as she hops off the counter. “I’ll tell them,” she offers and then makes a face at three startled expressions. “Don’t look at me like that. I can be helpful.”

“Sometimes,” Matt chimes in—voice warping oddly in and out of focus. “On rare occasion. Besides, best to let her interrupt them. Not like she hasn’t seen it all before.”

Pidge shudders delicately. “Ugh. Please don’t remind me. That was the longest summer of my _life_.”

Lance lifts his head, like a bloodhound catching the scent and arches an eyebrow at Pidge. There’s a story there. There’s dirt in them thar hill, he just knows it. Pidge gives him a slit-eyed look and then pointedly looks at where Allura still has a hand wrapped around his wrists at her waist. He subsides. Not even the possible opportunity to get material to roast their illustrious Black Paladins was worth declaring Allura open season for Pidge to go hunting for roasting material of her own.

He provides enough fodder for her sarcasm cannons all by himself.

Satisfied that her threat had been received and understood, Pidge saunters out of the kitchen. 

Allura shifts in his arms, resettles so she’s fit snug and secure, and then sighs soft and fond. “Am I spoiling you?” She asks and presses her cheek back against his forehead where he’s got face buried against her neck. “Is that what this is?”

Lance hums thoughtfully low in his throat. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Probably.”

She laughs again and runs her fingers through his hair, tugging gently, until he completely melts against her. “I think after today a little bit of spoiling isn’t so bad.”

Hunk gasps and presses a hand to his chest. “And where has Princess Hard-Ass gone?” he wonders while Allura giggle-snorts in, what Lance posits, is the most adorable fashion in the universe. “Who are you and what have you done with her?”

“A pod person,” Allura teases back, making Lance laugh into her hair. “But don’t worry, Princess Hard-Ass will be back at oh-dark-thirty for training.”

Lance rests his cheek against her shoulder, face still buried in her wild hair, and smiles to listen to Hunk and Allura tease and laugh, easy as water in a slow-moving stream. For a moment, for the long held-breath that was this space between one crazy confrontation with a mad empire and another, he could pretend that nothing was going on—that nothing existed beyond this space of light and laughter.

Hunk pokes the top of his head, then pokes it three more times until Lance finally raises his head and snaps his teeth at the offending digit. Hunk bops him with his spatula. “Don’t be rude,” Hunk scolds. “Dinner is ready, so unhand our princess and wash your hands, you filthy beast.”

Lance flutters his eyelashes at Hunk. “I’m only filthy for you,” he croons just for the way it makes Hunk roll his eyes and shove him. “You love me.”

“I don’t know why,” Hunk complains. “You are a disaster written across three dimensions and in seventeen languages.”

They stumble into the dining room still laughing and teasing each other—hands on each other’s elbows, backs and shoulders. Lance catalogues every crinkle-eyed smile Allura tosses them, every deep laugh Hunk lets loose as he hustles them along, for later inspection when he’s feeling low. Tucks them all away in the vault of his memory to pull forward when the dark and cold of space press in on him like shrinking walls. It’s a fire he keeps behind his ribs and feeds with every precious memory.

Shiro and Keith stagger into the dining room looking shell-shocked and raw. Pidge follows along behind them, expression tight and concerned. He arches an eyebrow at her and gets tiny headshake in response. Whatever new drama is brewing between their action heroes now is apparently not the time to draw it out of them. Lance bundles that problem away for future consideration and instead lets Allura pull him into a seat next to her. 

He catches Shiro’s quick, confused expression at their tangled fingers and easy teasing, and bites back a grin at the way Shiro tosses Keith a raised-eyebrow look of baffled curiosity. Nice to know that even their hyper-competent, super-serious leaders have gossipy streaks like the rest of them mere mortals. 

He doesn’t miss the way Shiro tries to shift the conversation back to plans, Lotor, and Haggar’s apparently hidden weapons through dinner to Allura’s mounting frustration. Notes the way Keith’s mouth twists at the corners every time the Blade of Mamora are conspicuously absent from their illustrious leader’s half-formed plans. Watches the way Pidge’s fingers beat out a steady drumbeat of tightly-contained irritation when he dismisses the rebel’s plans yet again. 

Lance can’t decide if this is just Shiro’s myriad control-freak tendencies coming to the surface after a bad scare, or some herald of deeper problems. While Lance is trying to figure out how to approach the problem Shiro comes to a shuddering stop and rubs his face with his human hand.

He catches Pidges eye again and makes a little gesture under the table towards the doors. Her eyes flicker down and then to Keith and Shiro. Her nod is a tiny thing, easily missed if you weren’t watching her like a hawk. And Lance has learned to keep a close watch on their pint-sized genius.

“I’m sorry, guys,” Shiro says without moving his hand from his face, voice suddenly soft and unsure. Keith drops a hand onto his arm, thumb moving in slow circles. “I’m just … worried I guess.”

Hunk, predictably, immediately melts and reaches over the table to pat Shiro. “Dude, it’s been a stressful, shitty day. We get it.”

“Not that shitty,” Pidge interjects. “We did just liberate a third of the known universe from Galra rule and we have their crown prince in custody.”

“I don’t think they want their crown prince,” Lance says, idly waving a fork at Pidge until she yanks it away from him and tries to stab him with it. “Does it count if they don’t want him?”

“He’s still a valuable information resource,” Keith says, frowning as Pidge and Lance continue to tussle over the fork until Pidge bites Lance, making him yelp softly and relinquish his fork. Allura hands him hers and he beams at her. “It doesn’t matter if the empire wants him or not. I think it’s better that they don’t want him. Less likely that they will try to get him back immediately.” Pidge makes a grab at Lance’s new fork and Keith sighs. “Can’t take you guys take this seriously?”

Pidge yanks the fork away and bundles it with the other two so she has tidy bouquet of silverware. She waves them at Keith. “I have been shot at, electrified, nearly blown up, and super charged with Altean magic—no, don’t apologize, Allura— _twice_. I’ll take things seriously tomorrow. Today, I am going to stab Lance, play with robot plans, and maybe program Matt’s coms to all play “I Am Ironman” when he gets incoming calls from Voltron.”

“Don’t program Matt’s coms to play “I Am Ironman” when he gets calls from Voltron,” Shiro says while Keith gets that little confused furrow between his brows. 

Pidge squints at Shiro suspiciously. “Is this a Skippy’s List thing?”

“Is this a—” Shiro sighs and rubs at the scar over his nose. “Yes. Yes, it is. Item one on the list of things that Pidge May Not Do As A Member Of Voltron is that you may not program Matt’s coms to play “I Am Ironman” when we call him.”

“Hah!” Pidge crows, punching one fist in the air before turning to wave a finger at Lance. “I win! I got a Skippy’s List before you did!”

“Dammit,” Lance groans. “You only got one because you asked. That totally doesn’t count. Besides, I’ve been told that I can’t do way more stuff than you.”

Pidge’s grin turns evil and slightly feral around the edges. “Nope. I win. You have to come reach all the tall shelves.”

Lance drops his forehead to the table and rolls it back and forth a few times before whining. “Hunk, tell her this isn’t fair, and it doesn’t count.”

Hunk reaches around Allura to pat his shoulder. “Sorry dude, you should have known better than to make that bet. And, uh, I don’t want to be her stepping stool any more. Have fun!”

“Ugh,” Lance says with feeling as Keith turns to Shiro with an increasingly confused expression. Shiro leans in close to whisper an explanation in his ear. Pidge catches his sleeve with two fingers and tugs.

“Come on,” she says with disturbingly sweet smile. “Sherpa duties start immediately.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Lance repeats with more feeling, but lets Pidge tow him out of the room by his wrist. Allura gives him a little finger wave before turning to help Hunk with the dishes. Keith and Shiro don’t even blink as the room empties around them.

Pidge drops his wrist once they are safely out of the dining room and down the hall. She pushes her glasses up her nose a bit and sighs. “You would think it wouldn’t be as easy to distract and redirect the pair of them now that Keith is a Blade, but I guess they haven’t gotten to teaching him subterfuge and redirection yet.”

Lance shrugs as they meander towards her workspace. “I think as long as we have weird pop-culture references to throw at Keith, we’ll have ways of sidetracking the pair of them so they don’t notice us slinking off to talk shit about them.”

“We’re not gonna talk shit about Keith and Shiro,” Pidge says with a small laugh.

“We aren’t?!” Lance yelps and presses one hand to his chest. “I’ve been lied to. I’m out then.”

Pidge grabs him by the belt and hauls him bodily into her lab when he fake-tries to turn and storm off. “Get in here, idiot.”

Lance grins down at her as she shoves him into her work bench. “So forceful! I like that in a girl.”

“Why are you like this?” She asks, but there’s a smile lurking in her expression, in the way her eyes crinkle at the corners. “It’s like you try to be as dumb as possible.”

Lance cocks his head and his hip in his best valley girl imitation. “But, Pidge,” he says with his best vocal flange, the one he only does for her. “Don’t you know that boys won’t like you if you are too smart?”

“Fuck boys,” Pidge says tartly. “Ain’t got time for them.”

Lance laughs and drapes himself over her back as she settles in front her laptop. She grunts at him, but allows him to wrap himself around her, so he can feel her back move with every breath. Just to remind himself that she’s here, she’s fine, she’s not an electrified crisp at the bottom of some pit. “The truth according to Pidge Gunderson.”

“Gospel according to your god and master,” Pidge agrees, and he can see the way her grin slides into something fond and delighted. “Anyway, you’re stressing about something so spit it out.”

Lance turns his face into her shoulder for a moment before flopping onto his back at her crossed legs, he raises his arms to hide his face while he thinks. “So,” he says slowly. “I’ve got a fundamental math problem.”

Pidge makes an interested noise in the back of her throat, her fingers moving like lightning across the keys. The tap-tap-tap sound a comforting counter-point to his hectic thoughts. She punches at her glasses before dropping one hand onto his chest over his heart. He presses a hand against it and she curls her fingers slightly into his undersuit. He takes it as a sign to continue.

Lance rubs a thumb over her knuckles as he thinks about how to phrase what he wants to say. Come at it too directly and she’ll explode; he knows this like he knows his own name. “It’s a. um. I don’t know, fundamental logic problem.”

“All math problems are logic problems,” she says before looking down at him with a curious head tilt. “What does this have to do with Shiro and Keith?”

Lance drops his other arm, so he can stare up at her. “I’m getting to it,” he complains. “It’s kinda hard to put into words.”

“You said it was a math problem,” Pidge says with a frown. “I’m not seeing how you are getting a math problem from whatever your deal with Shiro and Keith is.”

“I don’t have a problem with Shiro and Keith,” Lance replies and then sighs. “Or, like, not the way you think I do.”

Pidge curls her fingers tighter in the material of his under suit until he can feel it pull. “Explain.”

Lance makes a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. “I’ve been trying. But, like. Okay here: t(bp+rp│yp+〖bp〗^2+gp)+s(rp+bm)+f(rb)= lim┬(t-10000)ge Like. You get it or do I need to explain?”

Her fingers uncurl as she thinks. “BP and bp squared are black paladin and blue paladins—you and Allura?” At his affirmative grunt, she nods her head thoughtfully. “Rp, yp, and gp are obviously Keith, Hunk and me. Bm is the Blade of Mamora and rb is the rebellion. Also, you realize limit functions don’t work like that? Right? Like, the basic order of operations for this entire thing is a nightmare that can’t be solved.”

“I know that,” Lance groans. “That’s why I’m giving it to you. I barely got through diffy q with my soul intact. Though I think I might have had to sell parts of it off for that B. Don’t tell my abuela.”

Pidge’s fingers completely unfurl until she’s got them spread across his breast bone. She drums her fingers against his chest and he can feel the vibrations move across his sternum like the echo of a thunder. 

“T standing for, what? Trust function? Of course, I swear the inside of your head is code written in Basic. S for secret? I’m so surprised you didn’t have ss for super-secret. I can even hear the triple underline. F for what? Force, of _course_. All equal to a limit function of the Galra empire. Okay, first of all, a limit function isn’t going to be representative of the fall of the Galra empire _and_ you can’t set that opposite a modified quadratic, but I don’t think they gave you the functions for infinite-dimensional vectoring—wait no, you’d need—. Hm.”

He runs a thumb along her knuckles where she continues to drum her fingers against him in thought. “But you see the basic logic problem.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “Yeah, I do.”

“So,” he says slowly, waiting for her potential explosion. “You got any good solutions? Because I’ve got one, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be popular with the studio audience.”

Pidge’s fingers on his chest, on her keyboard, go still and she turns her head slowly until she can stare down at him, her face eerily blank as she studies him. “Your solution had better not be what I think it is.”

It’s tricky to shrug expressively when you’re flat on your back, pinned by one delicate hand of a pint-sized bad ass, but Lance makes it work. “Uh,” he says eloquently. “Depends on what you think that solution is?”

Her hand closes into a fist in his undersuit, the weight of it like a rock on his chest, and her eyes are very sharp as she stares down at him. “Lance.”

“I mean, one solution could be we all pray really, really, really hard to a god none of us believe in to smite Zarkon and rectify all wrongs,” he rambles, trusting in his innate ability to bullshit to buy him time until he can come up with way to phrase the nascent plan forming in the back of his head. “Or we could, you know, discover some other super weapon—“

“ _Lance_.” Pidge’s is a granite wall, a steel door, a point past which one cannot move.

He shuts up.

“I hate your plan,” she says and her voice is very young.

“You don’t even know what it is,” he says as he rubs a thumb along her knuckles. She frowns at him. “I mean, I don’t really know what it is beyond the bare bones. That’s why I’m here. You’re the smart one.”

She makes a face at him. “You can’t dump this on me, asshole,” she says with a voice that wobbles more than any time he’s ever heard it. “You can’t.”

“I’m not,” he says with a squeeze to her white-knuckled fist. “And I’m not abandoning you either. I’m not suggest I walk out of this fight. I signed up for it—better or for worse, like the worst marriage vows ever said—and I’m not leaving. Just … change in venue.”

“Yeah?” Pidge’s voice is as damp as a bayou swamp and twice as treacherous. “And what venue is that, if you’re leaving your lion? You can’t join the Blade like Keith can.”

“Do you think Matt isn’t in the fight just because he isn’t in a lion or part of the Blade?” Lance asks, voice soft—but it’s the sort of softness you get from the ocean before a riptide drowns your sorry ass. “Or is the rebellion cannon fodder?”

Pidge thumps his chest with her fist—just once but hard enough to make him curl against the impact. “You know I don’t think that!”

“Then where is the problem?” Lance asks. He knows where the problem lies—he can see the ache of loss and the terror of abandonment that has etched itself into each and everyone of them in a thousand different ways. 

Pidge looks away from him, glowers at her laptop like it can provide her with the answer. In the light of her laptop’s screen glare Lance can see the sheen of tears glimmer in her eyes and has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from taking back his words. “You know the problem.”

“Didn’t fight this much when Keith left,” he notes, though he’s not sure why. There’s a quantifiable difference in her reactions, though if you asked him how he was measuring it beyond a faint feeling in his gut the words would die in his throat. 

“Maybe I should have,” Pidge snarls low and viciously. “I’m never really prepared for exactly how stupid you boys can be.”

He runs a thumb along her knuckles until her fist finally relaxes, palm flat to his chest. “Maybe we all should have,” he says. “Not sure it would have done much, though. He’s pretty committed.”

“Which is why your plan won’t work,” she snaps, but the furious edge is bleeding out of her tone. “You really think that you are going to convince Keith to come back from the Blade so you can go be just another soldier with the rebels? You know he won’t agree.”

Lance shrugs again, holds her hand trapped against his chest. “I don’t plan on giving him much of a choice,” he says, surprised to find it to be true. “I don’t plan on giving anyone much of a choice. I figure I’ve got one good window of opportunity to pull this thing off, you know? Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.”

Pidge’s hand twitches under his as she grows quiet. Lance closes his eyes and waits. When Pidge can’t, or won’t, answer a question or a weigh in on an issue, she’s dismissive, sarcastic, ready with a cutting remark. But when she goes still and quiet she’s booting up the Pidge 3000XL Processor :tm: to really give the presented problem a thorough working over. 

“When Matt comes with Commander Olia to talk about Lotor, you’re going to leave with him,” Pidge says slowly.

“Yep,” Lance says, making the ‘p’ pop on the word, just a little obnoxious. He gives her his most charming grin when she gives him a side-eyes glare. “I figure your brother won’t mind a cute stowaway.”

“You aren’t that cute,” Pidge says, but there’s a smile lurking in the corners of her lips.

“First of all, rude,” he says, holding up one hand and ticking down fingers with each remark. “Second, I am absolutely that cute, you have no idea. And third, like Matt wouldn’t be down for helping a brother out with some shenanigans.”

That gets Pidge to stare at him hard, eyebrows beetling down into a deep furrow. “This isn’t a game, Lance.”

That gets him to sit up, right into her space, her hand still flat to his chest. He wraps his fingers around hers and keeps them trapped there, right where she can feel his heartbeat smooth and steady under her fingertips. “I know,” he says, soft and earnest in ways he so rarely lets himself be. “That’s why I have to do this.”

She curls her hand into a fist in his undersuit and uses to shake him. “No, you fucking do not. Maybe we should get Keith home, yeah, but that doesn’t mean _you_ have to leave.”

“Pretty sure it does,” Lance replies gently and lets her shake him a little more, sways with gentle push-pull of her fist over his heart. “The math is pretty straightforward on this one.”

Pidge makes a wounded sound low in the back of her throat and blinks rapidly. “You can’t leave me with _both_ Keith and Allura in all their reckless glory. You can’t leave me to deal with Shiro’s masochistic sense of responsibility. I can’t do this alone.”

He uses his bodyweight and the next pull of her shaking him to flop forward into her and wrap her up in his long arms. She automatically tucks her head under his chin and sniffles once, hard. Sometimes Lance wonders how much she looks at him and sees echoes of Matt (after meeting the man, sometimes Lance wonders how much _he_ looks at himself in the mirror and sees the same echoes) because it’s such a little sister gesture. One of absolute trust that makes the edges of his heart crack alarmingly.

Lance presses his cheek to the top of her head and sighs. “You won’t be alone. You’ve got Hunk and Coran to help you beat sense into them.”

“You think _Hunk_ is gonna agree to this,” Pidge says, and they both ignore the watery edges to her tone.

“Nope,” Lance agrees easily. “So, I’m not gonna tell him.”

“You aren’t going to tell Hunk something,” Pidge says incredulously. She pulls back to study his face. Whatever she sees there makes her scowl harder in furious rejection. “You are an idiot.”

Lance shrugs. “Not about this.”

“Yes, about this,” Pidge snaps. “You can’t just walk away from being a paladin.”

Lance squints at her and cocks his head. “Pretty sure you can. Pretty sure Keith did. And we both know of the two of us who can switch lions he’s not the best choice to be sitting things out.”

Pidge punches his shoulder and he rocks with the force of it. “He’s not sitting things out. The Blade is important.”

“And any Blade member can do what he does,” Lance points out. He feels tired, like they’re going in endless circles. Emotion playing merry hell with what should be a straightforward logic problem. 

“And any soldier with the rebels could do what you would do,” Pidge snaps back. “So, neither of you need to leave.”

“Then what,” Lance groans. “One of us is constantly sitting things out, sitting around as a spare? Cause we both know that if it’s a choice between me or Keith in Red, then it should be Keith. It’s, like, basic elemental strategy. You don’t have a pawn sitting in a knight’s position.”

He can see the moment the analogy derails Pidge. It’s in the way her head cocks to the side, eyes narrowing, lips thinning down into a thoughtful line. “Depends on the move. I mean, if you have an _en passant_ available. Like, white to E5 and the black to D5 then you could move—”

“Pidge,” he sighs feeling that odd mix of affectionate and annoyed. “Focus.”

“No,” she snaps and punches his shoulder again, hard enough to make him rub the place of impact. “The logic relates, because your base strategy is all wrong. Besides, you aren’t a pawn. You’re more like a bishop, you move all sideways and when you decide to engage it’s to take out something on the other side of the damned board.”

Part of him wants to preen at that, to stretch and crow at the recognition, but he grabs the impulse and shoves it in a box. “Not the point, Pidge,” he groans. “You’re getting fixated on the wrong things.”

She puts tiny fingertips to his breastbone and pushes until he gives in and flops over backwards, spread out before so she can walk her fingers up and down his chest in thought. “I don’t think I am,” she says thoughtfully. “You’re arguing that this is a matter of logic, strategy. Well, chess is ultimately a logic game, a strategy game, so let’s go with that.”

Lance grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes and kinda wishes he could rewind time to erase the analogy out of the air between them. But Pidge is like a dog with a bone about the damned thing, so he’s stuck with it now.

“If we have to,” he whines.

“You were the one who thought it up,” Pidge tells him with zero concern for how her beating the metaphor to death hurts things in his soul. “Your fault.”

He groans expressively, and she shoves him. “If I’m the bishop, what are you then?” He drops his hands, so he can watch her eyes go distant and thoughtful. “Never moving in a straight line, always where someone doesn’t expect. Knight?”

“Obviously,” Pidge responds, ever so slightly smug.

“Allura is the queen,” Lance says.

Pidge doesn’t bother to do anything other than roll her eyes.

“Hunk’s the rook.”

“No,” Pidge interrupts. “That’s Keith.”

“Rook can’t move until, like, third move and only if you are being very clever or very stupid,” he argues.

Pidge flicks his nose. “Shiro is the king, right?” At his nod she gives him a little shrug. “Dude. [Castling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling).”

Lance blinks at her and then bites back a snicker. “Right, right. Forget I ever doubted you.”

“I will forgive this transgression, my son,” Pidge says with gracious magnanimity, pressing a hand to her chest and giving a little bow. “Go forth and sin no more.”

“Girl, I am, like, a solid sixty percent sin and you know it.”

“More like ninety-nine percent, and I retract my prior statement as physically impossible for the subject in question,” she snarks back at him. 

“Are we sure Shiro is king?” Lance asks.

“Ignoring all of the secondary implications of that statement: yes.” Pidge says and then chews on one thumb nail. She doesn’t even blink when he pulls it from her mouth and gently traps her hand against his chest. “Think about it: no ranged attack, vulnerable to literally everything, but devastating up close and personal.”

“And if we lose him then the entire thing goes to shit?” Lance says with one eyebrow slowly arching.

Pidge winces. “Okay, so that part doesn’t work out so well. Since the only one we absolutely can’t lose, strategically speaking, is Allura, but everything else works out.”

Lance shrugs. “I think it works even strategically. Voltron, at least with this set of paladins, is fucked as a going concern if Shiro is permanently out of the picture. Keith will make sure of that if nothing else.”

“Harsh,” Pidge says, but doesn’t argue with him. “That leaves Hunk as the pawn.”

Now it’s Lance’s turn to wince. “I hate to analogize my best friend to a pawn, but…”

Pidge sighs. “Yeah. Let’s never tell him.”

That makes him widen his eyes at her in an exaggerated, comical gesture that makes her snicker. “ _Dude._ ”

“Yeah, okay,” Pidge says. “Point taken. He’d wring our necks for every part of this conversation.”

Lance runs a thumb over the back of the hand he has trapped against his chest and smiles at her. It’d be funny the way the chess metaphor settles her, brings her back into that place of cool logic and rationality instead of reactive emotion if it wasn’t so _her_. It hurts something at the edges of his heart to think about.

Pidge tugs her hand free to card her fingers through his hair, nails scrapping across his scalp. “Everyone has their role to play,” she says low and a little sad. “None of us can be removed from the board.”

Lance tips his head into her hand and makes a low hum. “But Keith has been removed from the board while he’s been with the Blade.”

Pidge makes a disgusted sound in the back of her throat but doesn’t stop scratching nails along his scalp, a soothing pattern up the base of his neck, across the dome of his skull and back down again. “Depends on how you are defining the board. And weren’t you the one saying that going to the Blade or to the rebels wasn’t leaving the fight?” She shrugs. “Thus, not leaving the board.”

He reaches up to flick her nose, making her wrinkle it and then stick out her tongue at him. “The board is Voltron, not the entire war,” he says, suddenly tired. “Don’t be daft. We’d need, like, thirty more pieces if you add in the Blades and the rebels.”

“So?” Pidge says with a shrug. “We can make a Raumschach.”

“Gesundheit?”

Pidge smacks him lightly. “Don’t be an ass. Three-dimensional chess, the first variant. That doubles the number of pawns and adds a new piece?”

Lance blinks. “Yeah? What’s that?”

“Unicorn,” Pidge says with a smug little grin. “Raumschach takes after the Persian shatranj rules for the irregular piece. It moves in a straight line”—Pidge makes a little gesture with one hand—“but it can jump a piece in that line.”

“Huh,” Lance says, playing with the fingers of the hand Pidge lays on his chest. “So, who is the unicorn?”

“Can’t you guess?” Pidge asks with a grin. “Matt. Obviously.”

“I can’t tell if you are being serious right now, or just can’t resist the dig at Matt even though he’s not even here,” Lance complains.

Pidge tilts her hand one direction and then the other. “Half and half. But we are off topic.”

“Like that’s surprising.”

She flicks his nose. “If we are talking elemental strategy,” she says, her voice taking on the exact cadence that it used to have in their emergency study sessions, “then losing both your bishops before end-game definitely means you lose.”

Lance grinds the heels of hands against his eyes and groans, low and soft. “Seriously, Pidge? Seriously?”

Pidge pries his hands from his face and peers at him for a long moment. “Okay,” she says slowly, as if she can’t quite believe the words that are coming out of her mouth. “Let’s make a bet.”

That gets him to sit up and grin at her, smile growing sharp and smug at the edges. “I like bets.”

“I know you do,” she says with a sigh. “You might even be able to win this one.”

“Hey!” He yelps, affronted. “I win bets.”

Pidge reaches out and ruffles his hair. “Rarely. You just can’t resist those high odds, flyboy.”

He grumbles incoherently for a moment, because as much as he’d really like to argue with her, she’s not wrong. Pidge never is. “Yeah, okay, whatever. What’s the bet?”

Pidge leans back, her eyes both sharp and heart-shatteringly sad. “Beat me at chess—not even the weird theoretical chess. Just standard chess,” she says slowly. “And I’ll help you”—she drags in a slow breath like she’s fighting the urge to cry—“I’ll help you convince Allura _and_ help you sneak off to the rebels.”

Lance can feel his smile grow so big he’s kinda convinced it meets up around the back of his head like a zipper. She glares at him.

“Using standard rules?” Lance asks. He kinda wants to turn it into a joke, into something to laugh off, but the shuttered seriousness of Pidge’s expression and the way his heart feels like it’s being bound by steel bands, keeps his voice low and serious.

She nods again.

“Okay. Okay,” he says, nodding slowly. “Just one game or best of three?”

Pidge snorts. “Best of three, no time constraints.”

Lance blows out a slow breath. They are doing this. Pidge watches him, eyes sharp and hard. She doesn’t intend to let him win and isn’t so arrogant that she’ll make dumb mistakes. He nods to himself again. “Cool,” he says quietly. “Deal.”

 

**ii. Caro-Kann Defense**

“Pawn to e4,” Lance says at breakfast apropos literally nothing. 

“That’s boring and uninspired,” she says after a jaw cracking yawn. She grins at him when she catches his sympathetic wince. “Pawn to e5.”

Hunk hands Pidge a cup of coffee and ruffles her hair until she swats at him. Sometimes she really resents being the littlest. “How are the two of you able to play _chess_ first thing in the morning after all of … yesterday?”

“You call me boring and uninspired,” Lance responds as if he didn’t hear Hunk. There’s a sharpness to his expression that has Pidge considering him over her coffee mug. “Pawn d4.”

That makes her arch an eyebrow at him. “King’s Gambit? That’s a little dated, don’t you think?”

Lance gives her a small, wolfish smile and spreads his hands. That smile grows as she thinks through her next move. Shiro and Keith stumble in looking like someone’d drug them both through a briar patch backwards and then electrocuted them for good measure. At least someone was missing sleep for more entertaining reasons than stress and leftover anxiety.

“What, Pidgeon,” Lance croons, low and obnoxious. “You can’t be telling me that this ‘dated’ gambit actually has you stumped?”

Pidge catches Keith turning to Shiro with questions stamped all over his face. Shiro gives him a little shrug. “Fine,” Pidge snaps. “Pawn to d4.”

Hunk rolls his eyes at both of them and hefts a plate. “You two are being ridiculous,” he declares. “I’m taking this to Allura.”

Lance’s expression twists for a half second, if Pidge hadn’t been watching—he was up to something using a King’s Gambit as an opener and she’d probably regret accepting it—she’d have missed it. But his expression clears and lifts the plate out Hunk’s hands easily. “Nah dude,” he says in that infuriatingly light tone he uses when wants people to write him off. “I’ll take it to our sleeping Princess. Can’t let our brave leaders fend for themselves for breakfast.”

Keith sputters out a denial as if he’s not sure where the insult is, but he’s certain there’s one somewhere in Lance’s pretty words. “We can make our own breakfast,” he barks. “Don’t make Hunk do it.”

She bites the inside of her mouth, hard, at the expression that Hunk makes at the idea of Shiro and Keith left unsupervised inside his immaculate kitchen. Hunk raises his hands and starts to make protesting noises at Keith while Lance just raises one slow, disbelieving eyebrow and says nothing at all.

“Or we can just get food-goo,” Shiro says soothingly, hands up to forestall Hunk’s impending lecture.

Hunk’s expression falls. “There’s no call for that,” Hunk says. “Food-goo isn’t food and no amount of pseudo-science from Coran will change my mind on that. You both sit.” Hunk glowers at them until they slink into chairs, looking small and cowed. Hunk folds up a napkin fussily and tucks it into Lance’s pocket. “You take that to the Princess and behave.”

Lance flutters his lashes at Hunk. “I always behave.”

Hunk smacks him, softly, upside the back of his head. “Be _good_.”

Lance just laughs at that readjusts to the plate in his hands. He looks at Pidge, that sharp look back in his eyes. “Pidgeon? Nf3.”

Pidge wrinkles her nose at him. It’s like he wants to be obvious and she doesn’t trust it. “D6,” she snaps back before taking a long sip of her coffee.

He cocks his head at her, thoughtful. “Oh,” he sighs, obnoxious as all hell and weirdly smug. “Fischer’s defense. I’ll have to think about that one.”

Shiro watches him go with a speculative look and small frown. A look he turns on her the second Lance is out the door. “Chess,” he asks, his tone the sort of mild that only comes with supreme effort. “I didn’t realize you played.”

Pidge hears the actual question, _I didn’t think Lance played,_ and bristles on his behalf. She gives Shiro a very flat look. “We used to play a lot. At the Garrison.”

“Oh man,” Hunk chimes in. “They were the worst during finals. You’d be studying in the library, minding your own business, and then one or the other would just shout out of nowhere a random string of numbers and letters and then the other one would swear.” Hunk waves a finger at Pidge. She bites at it. “The. Worst.”

Pidge snickers at the memory—its one of the few good ones she has of the Garrison. Lance had been so damned determined to find a way to connect, any way at all, that he’d taken to just shouting random chess openers at her—Vienna Game, Dunst’s Opening, Queen’s Gambit—until in a fit of frustration she’d shouted a countergambit back at him and then they were off. 

She punches at her glasses. “He assumed that I knew how to play chess because ‘all pint-sized, turbo-charged baby genius do, right?’ and would not leave me alone about it.”

Hunk rolls his eyes. “Yeah, and you really proved him wrong by beating him sixteen times in a row.”

“He’s never going to get any better if I don’t treat him seriously,” she says primly and then grins. “Besides, we’re at evened odds now. If he can be convinced to focus.”

“Really,” Keith says, looking startled. “Huh.”

Pidge pours herself another cup of coffee and then grumbles when Hunk pointedly removes the pot from her reach. She gives Keith a little shrug. “He’s sneaky when he wants to be.”

Keith and Shiro share a look that Pidge quite frankly doesn’t have the emotional intelligence available to decipher. 

“Matt sent over the signal bursts from that weird cruiser you nearly kamikaze-ed yourself into,” she says to the pair of them, ignoring the way Keith curls in on himself and Shiro shoots her a disapproving look. “I’m going to go see if I can crack it before he shows up with Olia. We’ve a bet.”

Shiro looks torn between wanting to chide her, probably for her blasé approach to Keith trying to splatter himself all over the energy shields of Haggar’s cruiser like a particularly suicidal gnat and snickering at the predictability of her and her brother. She can see the minute he gives up and laughs at her—though softly and gently. 

“Of course, you two do,” he sighs. 

Taking that as a dismissal she gives him a little salute with her coffee mug, mind already filling with code, and leaves the pair to their own, probably emotionally charged, devices.

///

She’s poking morosely at the signal code—playing with every inversion matrix she remembers without much luck unraveling its encryption—when the door to her labs hisses open. Pidge hunkers deeper into her chair and resists the impulse to swear. People are allowed to visit her while she’s working. She and Shiro had had more than conversation about how it was not appropriate to throw things at people just because you were feeling cranky.

(Also, if it’s Lance invading her space he has a tendency to throw things _back_ and he has better aim than she does.)

“If you ask me about the code I will throw my laptop at you,” she announces before her intruder can say anything. 

“Uh,” says Keith. “Okay?” 

iii. Hobson’s Choice

 

“I have an idea,” Lance says from where he’s lying with his head off the corner of the couch reading reports upside down.

“No,” Matt says on reflex. A wisely and scrupulously developed reflex born of exposure the all the ideas one bored Lance McClain could come up with to entertain himself.

Lance grabs his face with both hands and presses his body tight against Matt’s and Matt maybe forgets how to breath correctly for a little bit. It’s fine. It’s cool. He’s pretty sure Olia knows how to do CPR at this point.

“Matt,” Lance croons as he peers soulfully into Matt’s eyes. Which is, Matt’d like to point out, flat unfair. There should be some sort of intergalactic rules barring Lance McClain from using the puppy dog look on the grounds that one day it’s going to make Matt have a full triple valve heart attack.

“Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt,” Lance says. Pauses to think for a long moment and then presses Matt’s cheeks harder. “ _Matt_.”

“Yes, Lance,” Matt answers as best he is able while having his cheeks squished together like a five-year-old with an over enthusiastic aunt. Lance cuddles even closer into his personal space. Matt maybe thinks a little bit about dying.

“It is my _birthday_ ,” Lance says pitifully with big, blue eyes gazing mournfully into Matt’s. 

This is very frequently Lance’s favorite tactic. It does not often work for him as it is also very frequently not in fact Lance’s birthday and Matt is observant enough to notice. One of those small quirks of being a trained scientist-turned-rebel-operative: the ability to notice that Lance cannot possibly have his birthday every other week. Small things. 

Unfortunately, today actually is Lance’s birthday, a fact Matt cannot deny as the boy in question plasters himself to Matt and makes a small, piteous noise in the back of his throat.

“For the love of our lords Einstein and Kepler, what do you even want?” Matt sighs.

///

Matt blinks slowly as something loud, raucous and with a questionable synthized guitar track blares in his ear. He smacks around for his coms device while Lance grumbles incoherently. Lance rolls over and shoves his face against Matt’s neck. Matt, for a second, forgets entirely how to breathe. Which is impressive what with it being an involuntary process and all.

“If you don’t shut that off,” Lance slurs sleepily. “I will murder you. I’m good at murder. Don’t make me prove it.”

Matt fumbles his coms to silent and Lance goes pliant and soft against him. 

This isn’t _fair_ , he thinks. There should be rules. Laws against this. Matt fumbles the device over his face, so he can peer blearily at his sister’s chirpy message while Lance drools on his shoulder.

Pidge: Okay. Stop touching yourself inappropriately and heed my call!  
Pidge: Your mission, should you accept it—spoiler alert: you will!—is to hike yourself to the Outer Rim such that you can go fishing!  
Matt: whut  
Matt: Do you know what time it is here? It’s ass o’clock in the morning. I’m not even dressed yet nor have I found coffee  
Pidge: And Lance is lying on your arm.  
Matt: And Lance—  
Matt: Stop that.  
Matt: lion bond witch fuckery.  
Matt: Not that I don’t love you with the fullest depths of filial adoration and I’m delighted beyond all reason that you are asking me for help. But can’t I sleep? I was hitting some Galra officer in the face with a plank yesterday, Pidgeon, all strenuously.  
Matt: Life in the rebellion is hard and I never get to sleep in. :(  
Pidge: My heart it doesn’t bleed for you. Get up. Don’t put on your cutest outfit either. This is going to be messy.  
Pidge: I need your expertise.  
Pidge: Bring Lance. He can shoot things for you. I know you like that.  
Matt: I do.  
Matt: Not that this date don’t sound cute and I’m glad that you helping your brother, which I mean me, out with his romantic endeavors and all, but can I ask what we’re fishing for?  
Pidge: Dead AIs.  
Matt: whut  
Pidge: I … okay don’t freak out, but I, through means that I refuse to reveal, got a list of all of Haggar’s old labs and found something about Haggar developing an AI substrate through a quantum entangled array.  
Matt: And if we take out those substrates we basically blind her.  
Pidge: Yup.  
Matt: Huh.  
Matt: Wow.  
Matt: not saying that I’m shifting ass for you or nothing, but why haven’t you sent your two soldier boys after this? There’s nothing in this universe that either one of them have a bigger hardon for than fucking up Haggar’s plans. Well. Each other, but point stands.  
Pidge: …. IdontwanttotellShiro  
Matt: the fuck is going on with you paladins  
Pidge: >:[  
Pidge: Shiro will freak. And then Keith will freak and then it’ll be a big festival of freaking out and angst and nothing will get done while they are freaking out. You and Lance will be quieter, faster, and meaner. Please?  
Matt: ugh  
Pidge: Please  
Matt: _ugh_  
Pidge: Please  
Matt: fine  
Pidge: I love you!  
Matt: _UGH_

///

At this point in Matt’s, relatively speaking, short life pain has become an old friend. One that comes calling at the worst fucking time, always overstays its welcome and never does the washing up. It lives in the hollows of his bones and traces his neural pathways like the footpath home and he resents it every time. But it’s the type of awful familiarity that lets him shove it in a box and limp, bleedingly sluggishly, back to their base camp.

Lance is at his side like a magnet snapping into place the second he stumbles through brush.

“You fucking asshole!” he barks, but his hands are blissfully warm as he takes rough inventory of the myriad aches and injuries littering Matt’s body.

“I said I’d met up with you later,” Matt slurs. “Impatient fuck ass.”

“You say a lot of utter bullshit,” Lance says as he eases them down next to the fire. “I do you the favor of pretending like I hear precisely none of it.”

Matt struggles to look around their hidden camp. “Allura?”

“Gone to see if she can use the sonic canon to find your suicidally inclined ass,” Lance snaps. Matt groans when he presses a hypercine bandage to his ribs. “Matthew”—he startles at this. Lance never uses his full name—“You look like seven kinds of shit packed into one terrible bag. What the fuck happened?”

But the hypercine bandages are doing their thing and the painkillers flooding his system are a thing of wonder. So he just says: “Lance,” sort of muzzily and completely collapses. Lance’s mouth twists up and he looks, for a moment, infinitely and unbearably sad. Matt reaches up to touch the soft swell of his lips, drugs burning through his system like a forest fire, and pats his face gently. “Lance.”

Lance curls over him and says a number of things in Spanish that Matt is almost completely certain are entirely rude and uncalled for. Then he gathers Matt close, hands unholy warm against Matt’s bruised and battered skin, and holds him while the drugs work through his body like battalion going to war. 

Matt’s got to have an extra cortex entirely dedicated to being a smartass because he blinks up at Lance’s crumpled expression and coughs out a laugh before saying: “Hah. Knew you thought I was irresistible.”

“I think you are dumber than all fuck!” Lance says. “But thank you for having the good grace to not be dead.”

Matt blows him a raspberry, childish and high as a thousand kites. “Said I’d meet up with you.”

Lance fists a hand in the heavy fabric of his uniform and uses it to haul Matt upright so he can stare him straight in the face. His eyes are an unholy, brilliant blue—like the flame from a Bunsen burner, the center of a white dwarf. “Look at me,” Lance says. “Look at my face. This is the face I use when I am being completely and utterly fucking serious, do you understand me? And you will believe me when I tell you this: if you ever do anything so stupid as to throw yourself away playing bigshot, hardass rebel boy on a fucking _fetch quest_ I swear by every God of the sea and storm that the rebellion has ever heard of that I will storm the gates of Hell to drag you back so I can have the pleasure of killing you myself with a rusted out _spoon_. Do you understand me, you utter horror?”

Matt can only nod silently. This is a boy made of star fire.

Lance breathes out a shaking breath. “I thought you were _dead_ ,” he says. He cups Matt’s face with both hands and presses a burning kiss to Matt’s forehead like a benediction. “Never fucking do that again.”

 

///

**Fabian Strategy**

Lance blinks. “Huh, no wonder Shiro keeps saying you’re the prodigy hacker.”

Matt rolls his eyes in a really impressive show of disdain. “Thanks for that, Shirogane. Yeah, I’m _the hacker_. Let’s boil down everything about me to a two-word epitaph and call it a fucking day. I also used to be really fucking short, too. Can’t wrap your head around the enigma that is me until you break down that little factoid.”

“Well,” Lance says mildly. He’s getting pretty good at Holt Sibling Explosions :tm:. “It’s a three-word epitaph and he also said you’re probably the smartest cadet the Garrison ever saw, but that’s before he met Pidge.”

“Well, no shit we’re smart,” Matt says with a dismissive hand flap. “We’re ridiculously smart. We’re so smart it isn’t even funny. Fat lot of good that’s ever done anyone, being smart. That and a quarter will get me a coffee. You know?”

Honestly, Lance had no idea but there’s only so far a body could tolerate this type of temper tantrum. He cocks his head to the side and sweeps his eyes up and down Matt’s rangy form before sighing. 

“That,” he says firmly. “Is hyperbolic and more than a little teenaged, and I _am_ the teenager in the room. The rebellion might be a whole fuck ton less hierarchal than the Garrison, but they put a premium on smarts. And even I, way the fuck off in the cargo division, heard of the shit you pulled and got away with because you’re so smart. Besides, in this war we’ve only survived as long as we have because we use our heads as often as our weapons.”

“Nah,” Matt says and slumps against the wall of tech that Lance frankly doesn’t understand and doesn’t care about. “What you are talking about is _not being stupid_. I’m talking about being _smart_.” He makes a gesture with his hands, like pulling something apart. “Two different things. Take Shirogane, fucking jock, he’s not stupid, you know? He’s smart _enough_ that he’s not going to trip over his own damned feet and drown in a puddle. Or get whacked by a psychotic witch with questionable fashion choices. Or Keith. High-strung, emotional jackass most of the time but he’s not dumb. But they’re not _smart_.”

Lance feels the deep and profound need to be catty. “That’s just you and your little sister then? In your highly exclusive Smart Club.”

“Hunk’s in it,” Matt says without a shred of facetiousness. He shrugs. “Look, you can be smart, or your can be happy. Two don’t go together generally.”

 

 

**Stand Alone Complex**

He floats for an indeterminate amount of time in the silence and darkness of his own head. His eyes hurt like a bitch. When he raises a hand up to investigate it comes back feeling tacky and wet. He’s lying on his side curled around something warm and heavy: Matt.

His heart tries to seize like an engine with sugar in it.

Lance runs a hand over Matt’s side, counting ribs and feeling for any damage that can’t be dealt with omnigel and hypercine bandages. Matt gives a small hiccupping groan of pain but otherwise doesn’t do much to indicate he’s not two heartbeats away from taking a permanent corpse nap. He pries his arm free of Matt’s dead weight carefully and smooths his hands across the fragile dome of Matt’s skull checking for injuries. Something tight and terrified unknots itself in his chest when he finds none.

Dragging himself to his feet he waves his arms in front of him for a moment. The air moves but the darkness remains deep and impenetrable. 

A tiny voice inside his head says: _Get down, dipshit._

Lance blinks and says out loud, “What?”

_Get DOWN!_

He drops. Training reasserting itself like instinct and he tucks up tight to the wall, dragging Matt’s dead weight with him. Shiro would be, Lance’s certain, very proud. There’s a hiss and whine of laser fire over his head. He presses them up against what he’s guessing is one of the odd bulwarks that liter the ruins. Matt moans, the sound wet and hitching, but blessedly lays still.

 _Meat shit_ , says the voice. _What do they teach baby paladins these days? How to catch sniper rounds in your mouth?_

 _Fuck off_ , he thinks grumpily. _I am having a very bad day. My partner’s maybe dying, I’m buried under a metric fuck ton of weird alien tech and I think I might be blind_.

 _No shit you’re blind_ ,” says the voice, but he thinks it sounds gentler than before. Lance’d kinda come to terms with the fact that going absolutely bug-fuck insane was a high probability in this war. He’d made his peace with the PTSD and paranoia, the night terrors and the trust issues, but a little voice inside his head? Seems unlikely. Little too pat, too trite. _Freak out later,_ it says. _You need to do something about the scouts trying to blow off your pretty little head._

He’d been told that the voice inside your head isn’t anything like your actual voice. That’s why hearing yourself on coms or recorded is always a trip and a half. But he’s pretty sure his inner voice should be, at least, you know, _male_.

 _If you have ideas,_ he thinks with all the sarcasm he can muster with his eyes a bloody, burning mess and Matt’s breath coming thin and thready across his skin. _I’m all ears_.

Either the voice in his head is as equipped to recognize sarcasm as Keith or chooses to ignore him. _There’s a rifle about a foot to your left. Grab it._

Lance presses Matt back against the wall and stretches one arm across the stone floor until his fingers bump the metal butt of his rifle. There’s a little bit of flailing until he drags it over to himself. He runs his hands up the barrel and stock. Scope’s missing, he notes distantly, but he figures he doesn’t really need that so much anymore.

 _You remember I’m blind, right?_ he thinks. Arguments with himself in his own head. Not how he’d expected to die, really. _You really picked the wrong sniper to attempt to possess. Blind and I think kinda full of holes, but I’m not a 100% sure of that. Don’t quote me._

 _Do you always ramble this much? You’re blind, baby paladin, I’m not_ , the voice says. _Crawl three feet to the left. Yes, there you go. The edge is about eye height, you can prop it—oh for the love of—_ , the voice says, annoyed, when Lance cowers down against the wall, frozen on the spot and unsure of which direction to go. It sighs, which is an odd feeling—someone else sighing in his head. _This gaggle of idiots are rank amateurs. You stood up and did a dapper little pantomime for a solid thirty ticks and they still missed your perky butt by six feet._

 _You think my butt is perky?_ he thinks, startled. 

_Focus. Kill the scouts now, flirt awkwardly later,_ it chides him.

 _I do not flirt awkwardly,_ he thinks furiously and crawls forward. After a couple of feet, he bumps into the gently curved edge of the bulwark. 

_Yes,_ the voice drawls, slow and obnoxious. _You absolutely do._

 _Fuck you!_ he thinks as he runs a hand along the top of the bulwark. It’s about four feet from the ground and a foot deep. He waits for the sound of laser fire.

 _Easy, these assholes suck, remember?_ the voice reassures him. _Unfortunately it looks like she sent down actual flesh and blood scouts instead of drones. I could brute force override drones; these idiots we’ll have to deal with the old-fashioned way. Get the rifle into position._

 _It’s not a rifle,_ he thinks muzzily. He might have a concussion. Do you get voices in your head due to concussions? He should ask. _It’s a tokarev_.

 _Oh shit,_ drawls the voice. _My mistake. That is the most important thing right now, isn’t it? Get the fucking thing on your fucking shoulder before they fucking paste us, baby paladin. Also, that sounds like a type of dildo. Who names their rifles after dildos? I have questions._

Weirdly the rambling helps sooth his nerves. It’s fitting, somehow, that the manifestation of his crazy should run at the mouth as badly as he does. The use of _us_ is also incredibly reassuring. He hefts the tokarev into position and fits it to his shoulder. Leans his cheek in to sight through the scopes on reflex and then sighs.

 _Yo, mystery voice,_ he thinks. _I hope you have a work around for the entire ‘the sniper is fucking blind’ because I don’t._

 _I got you,_ it says and Lance takes comfort in the total confidence. _To your left ten degrees. Five more. Now drop the barrel an inch. There._

This is it, Lance thinks in the questionable privacy of his own mind. He’s finally fucking snapped. Psychic, semi-sentient lions and multi-millennia long intergalactic war and only just now he’s finally gone insane. The stress of a mission gone completely tits up, Matt lying drowning in his own blood in his lungs, and Lance’s sight burned out by ancient alien tech they don’t understand, and Lance has completely gone around the bend. He’s made up an imaginary friend with a hot, low voice to drawl comfortingly in his ear right before he bites it. This isn’t even PTSD. It’s just straight up lock-him-in-a-straightjacket insanity. The Galra flooding the ruins were gonna find him mumbling to himself like a homeless hobo, pointing his rifle at ancient pylons and just put him out his misery with a meat cleaver. Really, he should do it himself. Haggar likes human test subjects.

What the fuck ever. He might as well take one of those fucking pylons with him.

He pulls the trigger. The tokarev gives the tiniest of jerks against his shoulder.

 _Headshot!_ , the voice reports, pleased. _And his buddy is standing there like a slack-jawed idiot. To your right. Further, further. Right there._

Lance takes a slow breath, holds it, and pulls the trigger.

 _Nice_ , crows the voice and Lance breathes out on a four count. _Now you can go do whatever reenactment of a Greek tragedy you were thinking of doing. I’m not getting any other hostile readings. Looks like they only sent down two scouts._ There’s an odd feeling of someone clicking their tongue. But inside his head. _They are so lazy. It’s depressingly unprofessional._

 _I think I’m just gonna take a little nap, actually!_ Lance replies, and then passes out.

///

Lance wakes up to a world on fire.

It’s as if every other sense his body possesses decides all at once to come online and then jack themselves straight into the stratosphere. He can feel every grain and weave of Matt’s jacket where he’s got his hand fit right against Matt’s chest. Lance can hear the slow and unsteady beat of Matt heart like a full orchestral percussion section. The smell of blood, electrical fires and the sharp ozone scent of discharged laser cartages chokes him. 

The bubble of his consciousness suddenly expands and he’s aware of two beings crouched over him and Matt. He can feel the air displace as one of them reaches for Matt. He can hear their heartbeat pick up when they realize he’s awake. He can smell odd disinfected smell of vacuum resistant armour.

His fist is moving before the rest of his mind catches up to it. There’s a satisfying _whoof_ of breath as he lands right hook that would’ve done Hunk proud.

 _Two_ , the voice reports. _Human/human-variant, male, one medium build and lean, the other’s a bruiser. You just sent the little one flying with a glorious right hook. Block left!_

Even without his mystery voice sketching the scene Lance can _feel_ the other moving towards him and he catches their arm in an elbow block and rolls them both until he’s sitting on their back, one knee pressing hard against their spine. He draws his boot knife on muscle memory. 

_Four inches down, and to your right,_ the voice says and he can hear the male he has pinned draw in harsh breath when he presses the knife down. Lance can smell the metallic tang of copper-based blood as it beads along their throat. _Ease up, baby paladin_ the voice cautions. _Assuming this is a negotiation, not an execution._

Lance swallows hard. Every nerve he has screams in a cacophony of pain. “That’s Matt,” he rasps. “No one hurts Matt. Not ever.”

“We’re not going to hurt Matt,” the male under him says, slow and gentle. It’s a voice he knows even if all the harmonics are distorted by his new and improved sense of hearing.

He loosens his hold. “Shiro?”

Lance can feel the air move, a gentle wind, and he tries to throw himself out of the path of the storm, but Keith has always moved faster than any one has any right to and the world on fire goes cold.

///

He comes half-awake inside Red’s cockpit, her purr an overwhelming pressure against his mind, and tries to blink his way out of disorientation. There’s no voice in his head; no sound at all except the hum of Red’s electrics and a pair of low voices in a hushed conversation. 

“—landed that punch better than he ever did in training. Hurts like a bitch,” one is saying, agitated. He knows that annoyed voice.

“Let me see,” say another, lower and calm, maybe a little amused. 

There’s a soft snort. “Look after yourself. He nearly slit your throat.”

“No,” there’s a soft laugh. “He knew exactly where I was.”

“But he’s got to be—”

Red’s purr grows louder, and she drags him into the velvet darkness of sleep.

///

The world is both dark and on fire when he stumbles out of the cyropod. 

He snaps his head to the side searching the darkness and then swears as viciously as he knows how when he remembers he’s blind.

 _Your partner is in the next cyropod over,_ says the voice, gentle and helpful. _Funny little things: paladins inna jar._

 _Huh,_ Lance thinks muzzily. He puts an arm out, find the edge of the cyropod and finger walks his hands up to the display. _You’re still around. You gonna, what, just set up shop?_

 _Well,_ it says, drawing out the vowel obnoxiously. _It seems like a very nice head to be in—cranky roommates notwithstanding._

Red and Blue are choppy waves of distress and displeasure threatening to drown him. They press against his consciousness like cats seeking comfort. His head feels both light and stuffed full cotton balls. The metallic taste of blood lingers in his mouth. Bleh.

 _Mint chewing gum apparently clears up that problem,_ the voice chirps cheerfully. _I’ve been reading up on your species!_

In tandem, Red and Blue growl low and warningly at this new intruder. Blue vibrates with curious anxiety, her presence flowing around the edges of his mind. Red, always more direct, is barely contained aggression. 

_Chill_ , he tells them. _I need a minute_.

There’s an odd feeling of a great subsiding, a Wyatt Earp at the O-K corral moment, only the corral was the inside of his head and the federal marshals are a pair of ancient war machines. Lance’s supremely uninterested in discovering what the collateral damage might look like.

In the uneasy silence that follows the thrum of electronics pulses under his feet, pulling him back into his physical body. The sterile, chemical-clean smell of Altean medicine folds around him and he lets out a sigh he didn’t know he was holding. There’s a soft sound, the slither of fabric against smooth metal, and he’s on high alert from one breath to the next.

 _10ft away, leaning against the wall, male, arms crossed like he’s posing for an action holo advert, scowl, bad hair_ , his mystery voice reports near instantly.

Lance bites his lip to keep from laughing and Red huffs her annoyance across the bond. _That’s Keith_ , he says. _I’m not sensing anyone else._

 _Just you and the guy who looks like he swallowed a whole bushel of kaffir_ , the voice confirms.

 _Kaffir?_

_Small yellow type of fruit? Sort of sour/tart little things._

_Lemons._

_My fruit,_ the voice tosses back. _My word for them._

Red makes a low irritated sound across the lion bond and Lance realizes that he’s missed whatever it was Keith decided to use as an ice breaker. Probably an insult. 

_I thought paladins were supposed to be, you know, at least friendly with each other?_ the voice says, bemused and, just maybe, a little disappointed.

 _Hah,_ Lance thinks back. _Hah. Hah. Hah. Do you hear my laughter? It is a joyful but disbelieving sound. One: not a paladin--_ Blue and Red give twin snarls of disapproval and he gives them the mental equivalent of an eyeroll _\--and two: all we need is to not be actively at each other’s throats. Power of friendship, it turns out, is highly overrated. Sorry to burst any happy anime bubbles you might have had._

 _Hm,_ says his mental hitchhiker and nothing else.

Blue pushes her way to the front of his awareness and on the other side of the bond he can feel Allura distantly—alarmed and confused at his sudden presence in the bond. Blue spreads her consciousness over him like mist, like a roiling fog, sweeping across his senses until nothing is left without her cool touch. Lance drags in a breath and he feels hard fingers dig into his elbow. He clutches back, disoriented and terrified, as Blue unfolds her senses around him.

She chuffs at him, pleased with herself, and reality unravels itself for them. 

A sweep of stars, glittering trails of gas and dust, the furious hunger of a white dwarf star spill across the darkness of his ruined vision. He turns his head watches as paths of quintessence, twisting themselves in gold and blue and nearly neon green, arc across the path of stars. The hum of the Castle’s electrical systems mutates into a shifting symphony of notes wrung from the gravitational waves of collapsing stars. The universe spreads before him, a burning cold field of energy and he _drowns_ in it.

Blue’s awareness spreads and spreads and spreads until there’s no space left, no quiet place of reflection, and her happy rumble is an avalanche. 

_Seeseesee_ , she croons in delight. _lionhelps. Pilotsees._

Lance has never heard words across the bond before and each one burns like napalm. 

He doesn’t realize he’s screaming until Blue’s presence vanishes like a ghost at dawn. Lance clutches at the arms holding him and shudders as his senses readjust to his reality. His limited, teeny-tiny reality.

 _That_ , says the voice, fucking sucked. Let’s never do that again.

“Agreed,” Lance whispers. 

“Agreed?” Keith’s asks, and Lance realizes with belated chagrin that it’s Keith he’s clinging to like a toddler after a bad dream. “Agreed to what?”

Lance pulls back and runs a hand over the clinging material of the cyro-suit as if to smooth it down. “Blue tried to give me her senses. We agreed that the experiment was a botch.”

“Oh,” Keith says thoughtfully. And then, “They can do that?”

“Apparently,” Lance replies and stands up. He doesn’t know what kind of expression he’s making. “But I think we need to work on toning down the ‘I-am-elder-goddess’ senses for, you know, the limited and squishy human. It was a little, uh, overwhelming.”

“You were screaming,” Keith says.

 _You cried like a little wiggler and he petted your hair and rocked you,_ the voice chirps helpfully. _It was adorable._

 _If you are going to lie_ , Lance thinks back just a touch sardonic. _At least pick a believable lie._

“That explains the sudden sore throat and burning desire to climb into a hole and drag the earth over me,” he says out loud. 

Keith makes a noise caught between a sigh and a laugh. “Are you okay?” He asks cautiously. “I mean—”

 _I’m not lying_ , the voice says at the same time. _It’s rude to assume someone you’ve only just met is lying to you. Bad manners all the way around._

“You mean what,” Lance asks, cocking his head. He can hear the way Keith’s heart rate picks up and there’s an odd ruffling sound—Keith raking a hand through his hair he guesses. “You mean how am I handling being blind? The fact that my partner is probably dead? Or having a Voltron lion try to download their entire optical array into my puny human head? Pick a thing.”

 _The day that Keith Kogane cares about anything other than Shiro and The Mission :tm: is the day the universe dies screaming,_ he shoots back. _What’s Matt’s status?_

The voice in his head makes a disgusted noise—which is very odd feeling—and then sighs in defeat. _I have a wonder about your perceptions, but whatever. Let me yank your partner’s diagnostic feed. One tick. Ah. There it is. Major contusions, laceration along the left dorsal latissimus, micro fractions along the cranial casing, ruptured spleen blah blah blah—Okay. He’s going to be in there for a solid quintent._

 _Anything permanent?_ he thinks as he tries to remember how to keep his breathing slow and steady. 

“Lance?” Keith asks, tone just slightly huffy. Oh. He must have missed something.

 _He asked if your eyes hurt_ the voice says helpfully. _And then said you were being melodramatic about your ‘partner’ being dead. You could hear the air quotes around the word. Is there drama? I sense drama. And no, Matt won’t have any lasting damage beyond a truly spectacular case of the stupids._

Lance breathes out a slow breath and tries to ignore how much it shakes. “I am not being melodramatic. Shit went south really fucking bad and last two times I came around Matt was bleeding, breathing unevenly, and I couldn’t check for injuries because I’m, if you haven’t noticed, kinda blind at the moment.”

 _Unfortunately I’m pretty sure Matt’s case of the stupids are incurable. But I do plan on shaking him until his teeth rattle out,_ he thinks at the same time. He’s starting to get the hang of this dual conversations thing.

 _Solid plan_.

Keith is saying something, probably sarcastic, and Lance tunes him out in favor of poking around the edges of his mind. Blue and Red rumble at him from their respective sides of his mind, unhappy and worried, but hesitant. His newest hitchhiker seems to float along the edges of his awareness like a ghost. 

_Do you have a name?_ he asks. _It’s getting weird calling you ‘voice’ all the time._

There’s a long pause. _Nah,_ the voice says. _Lost it in a card game._

“Uh-huh,” he says out loud when Keith takes a breath. _Aww. That’s sad. What the hell do I call you._

Keith heaves a sigh. “Look, if you aren’t going to talk to me, just. Just. Talk to someone?”

Lance cocks his head as Keith’s heart rate spikes and falters, and his scent picks up a sour note (which, ugh, now he has to smell people? Great. Grand). He’s apparently made the wrong agreeing noises. Whoops. He gives Keith a jaunty little salute and something he hopes looks like his normal easy grin. “Don’t worry, brave co-Leader,” he says breezily. “I’ll be sure to give a detailed report to Olia. You know, my actual boss these days?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Keith sputters and there’s that odd rustling noise again—Keith’s gonna go bald at the rate he’s tugging on his hair and Lance isn’t sure that would actually improve on that haircut. “You know what? Whatever. Shiro can deal with you.”

“Bye!” Lance calls as Keith stomps out with a little finger wave in what he hopes was Keith’s general direction. 

_Is there a reason you were working so hard to piss him off until he stormed out?_ his mental hitchhiker asks.

 _Is the a reason you won’t give me a name?_ Lance snaps back. He reaches out to where he can hear the hum of Matt’s cyropod and presses his palm against the smooth dome. He can feel the chill even before his skin touches the glass. _Doesn’t even have to be your name. Also, that? That’s just natural talent, baby girl, I can breathe and send Kogane into a screaming rage._

 _I am almost entirely certain that’s not a talent you should be refining,_ the voice tells him. _You can call me Lapsed Pacifist._

Lance laughs out loud before he can stop himself. Giggles helplessly against the glass of Matt’s pod. _Seriously?_ He asks. _You cannot be serious._

 _What?_ Lapsed Pacifist asks innocently. _I like it. I feel it is nicely evocative._

Lance shakes his head. He may have finally snapped, gone all the way around the bend, and dreamed up himself an imaginary friend to keep him company in the silence and dark of his own head, but at least they’re funny. _If you really don’t want to tell me, yeah, this works_.

There’s another of those long pauses. _Would you believe that it’s been so long since someone has asked my name that I forgot?_

 _Now that’s just sad,_ Lance thinks back, but he can believe it. Haggar’s labs had been silent tombs to her abandoned obsessions. Only the ghosts knew how long it had been since anyone had set foot in them. 

_I open up to you,_ says the voice, all faux-huffy, _And this is how you treat me. You are such a rude child._

Lance laughs again and rests his head against the cool glass of the cyropod. If he listens very, very carefully he thinks he can hear Matt’s heart beat slow and steady. He curls his fingers against the glass. _I know,_ he thinks and they both ignore how it sounds a little forlorn even inside his own head. _I owe my mama a written letter of apology._

 _Come on, kid,_ it says, soft and gentle. _Lurking around here isn’t doing your mental state any favours._

 _Exactly fuck all about this entire war has done my mental state any favours_ , Lance thinks back, but he manages through sheer force of will to pry himself away from Matt’s pod. _I’m actually kinda impressed it took me this long to go talking-to-myself-crazy._

Lapsed Pacifist makes a thoughtful sound that reverberates around the inside of his head queerly like a struck bell—except the bell is the inside of his head—but only says: _You know. It’s not insanity when you talk to yourself._

_No?_

_Nah,_ there that odd feeling like a sigh or a hum, _It’s when your own self gets up and starts talking back._

That makes him sputter out another disbelieving laugh, but it’s enough to get him to find the strength to stumble his way out the door. _I’d like you to know,_ he thinks with the appropriate amount of self-deprecation. _I am normally much cooler than this._

 _Are you,_ it says with a really insulting amount of disbelief.

 _I am,_ he thinks back, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. _I am so cool, you don’t even know._

 _People watching you go past and thinking ‘oh shit, that dude’s so cool the ambient temperature just dropped ten degrees.’ Something like that?_ it says.

Lance snickers as he makes his way down the hall, fingers trailing along the wall, moving on muscle memory as much as anything else. _Cooler. I come into town and the weather starts reporting a polar vortex. In the middle of July._

 _Oh damn,_ it drawls. _We better lock you up to keep you from destroying some poor innocent planet’s weather systems._

 _Baby girl,_ he thinks. _All this coolness cannot be contained._

 _Sure, coolkid_ , it says, and he thinks it sounds amused. _Woah, shit. Hot dude twelve o’clock. Like gods damn._

 _Lapsed!_ he chides even as he’s dragging himself away from the wall and trying to look less like a pathetic mess. _Keep it in my pants!_

“Lance,” Shiro says, his voice all serious and solemn and Lance can’t help the way his mouth twists up. “Keith said you were out of the cyropod a little early.”

“Huh,” Lance says slowly. “Either Keith wasted literally zero time racing off to tattle, or I spent way longer doing my rendition of a Victorian maiden having a fit of the vapours in front of Matt’s pod than I thought and its even odds for which of these things are true. What say you? Split the difference and call it half of one, twelve dozen of the other?”

 _Now that,_ Lapsed Pacifist says with admiration, _was a really impressive eyeroll. You have a gift, coolkid. You should use it wisely rather than squandering it like this._

 _I know, right?_ Lance thinks back right as Shiro sighs deeply and says: “Lance,” in that deeply disapproving tone that he has not missed at all.

“Sorry, bossman,” Lance says, with an easy grin he can feel go sharp around the edges. “Except, wait, you aren’t my boss any more, are you? So, I’m just gonna head to the nearest horizontal surface and sleep until sometime after the heat death of the universe, if you don’t mind.”

There’s a really surreal moment when he can both hear Shiro and feel Lapsed Pacifist sigh in bizarre stereo. It makes him shiver from the force of uncanny valley vibes.

Ignoring both of them, Lance steps around Shiro, fingers brushing along the wall again, and keeps walking. He ducks down, shoulder dropping and then turns to glare at about where he thinks Shiro must be standing, hand out stretched and glowering at him. He really hopes he’s actually glaring at Shiro. The entire look would be wasted if he’s, instead, hitting the wall with his best I-will-murder-you stare.

 _That is the saddest of sad puppy dog looks,_ Lapsed Pacifist reports. _Also, nice dodge._

 _Thanks,_ Lance thinks shortly as he straightens up. “What?”

“You’re still part of the team,” Shiro says slowly. “And I’m worried.”

The sound that burbles out of Lance’s throat can’t figure out if it wants to be snort of derision or a laugh when it grows up and gets stuck as some unholy bastard of the two. Lance waves a hand in front of himself. “In what way, am I still part of your team, Shirogane?”

 _Well,_ says Lapsed Pacifist. _That certainly put his back up._

 _Fuck him. Fuck this._ Lance shoots back furiously, balling up his fists. _I’m done with his condescending bullshit._

 _Coolkid,_ the voice says, and there’s something like a warning in its tone.

He can hear Shiro’s slow inhale like he’s counting to ten—probably backwards and in multiple languages—and Lance grinds his teeth so hard he can feel his jaw pop. “I’d think,” he says before Shiro can get started with whatever lecture he’s got stored up and ready to deploy. “That I made it pretty obvious that I wasn’t on your team anymore when I, you know, left.”

 _And the sad puppy dog look is back,_ it says. _Coolkid, dial it down. You need to control your anger—you know it’s not even him you’re pissed with._

“What I know,” Shiro says at the same time. “Is that you left for reasons that neither you nor anyone else will explain. You wouldn’t even talk to me before now.”

 _One: I am way past fucking angry. Two: stop psychoanalyzing me—we’ve only just met, and I don’t lay down and get all vulnerable for just any hot voice in my head,_ he thinks at the same time as he opens up his mouth and says: “There wasn’t exactly a lot to talk about, was there? I mean, fuck, how long did it even take you to notice I’d gone? Three weeks? A full month?”

“About seventy-two hours,” Shiro responds, voice so dry it could be a desert wind, while Lapsed Pacifist says: _I’m the only disembodied voice in your head. If I don’t get to psychoanalyze you, no one does._

And the one-two combo of that leaves Lance blinking for a solid thirty-ticks. _Huh,_ he thinks like the grade A strategist he is. 

Shiro takes the opportunity place a heavy hand on his shoulder. “You could have talked to me, the team, about it.”

Lance startles back, smacking Shiro’s arm away and snarls—wordless and feral—before getting himself back together with a little shake. “There is no _team_ ,” he spits. “There’s you and Keith, our Brave Leaders—”

At this Lapsed Pacifist makes an odd sound that Lance doesn’t know how to interpret. _Damn, Coolkid, can you pack any more bitterness into that?_

Lance sends back a burst of intense frustration and ignores her as best he is able and continues what he knows is a growing tirade, bubbling out of him like a geyser of some deep vein of irritation only just now tapped.

\--“and then rest of us minions that you order about as you see fit. You don’t listen to Hunk or to Pidge, or even to Allura unless you’ve forced her to throw down an ultimatum and then you treat her like a temper-tantrum throwing spoiled princess. Which, by the way, fuck you for that. She ever calls me up crying because you are being an asshat again and I will rip out your intestines and hang you by them.” Lance ignores Shiro’s sharp inhalation and barrels on. Now that he’s talking he’s not sure he knows how to stop. “You sure as shit don’t listen to _me_. So, tell me, why would I bother talking to you when I know all your canned responses? I think you have a flowchart all mapped out with them: If Paladin A says something about how the plan is reckless follow with Canned Response 2 about calculated risks. I mean, shit, not to quote a meme at you or anything, but: you might calculate the risks, but holy shit are you bad at math. Only you never fucking ever let anyone try to correct it except Keith and for fucks sake he is even worse than you.”

At the end of his rant Lance is shaking a little bit and he can hear Shiro’s heartbeat pick up and pound in anxious staccato—something in that rant pissing Shiro off but good. Lance rubs a hand over his ruined eyes and grimaces. “I didn’t bother talking to you,” he repeats, suddenly feeling tired and wrung out. “Because there was nothing to say. Besides it wasn’t even really about you. It was just good strategy.”

Lapsed Pacifist is suspiciously quiet inside his head and he’s not sure if he should take it as her agreeing with him or just not wanting to get involved in this particular round of paladin family drama.

Lance can hear Shiro nod slowly—the little rustle of clothes, the way the air moves slightly—and he holds his breath waiting for Shiro’s response. Literally waiting with baited breath, Lance kinda wants to laugh at himself but also doesn’t want to fuck up the moment. Dilemmas, man, he has them.

“You don’t trust my, or apparently Keith’s, ability to think strategically,” Shiro says slowly. “But it was good strategy to leave the team in our hands? I’m sorry, but I don’t think I follow your logic.”

Lance opens his mouth, closes it, and sighs. “Man, if I had working eyes, I’d be rolling them right now, just let me tell you that.”

“Oh,” Shiro says in that same dry tone. “I think you managed the eyeroll just fine.”

That’s … actually good to hear, really. Eyerolls are one of his favorite expressions, he’d be super sad to lose them. When he says this Shiro huffs a laugh at him. Lance leans against the wall and runs his hands through his hair and then makes a face “Look, it’s just basic math, right? Five lions, six pilots, two super secret organizations. Someone is going to have to sit things out, yeah? It doesn’t make _sense_ for it to be Keith. He’s a better pilot. You actually trust him, rely on him, your team work is better with him.” Lance shakes his head. “It just didn’t make sense.”

He can hear the humming bird fast beat of Shiro’s heart and wonders at it a little bit. Shiro’s quiet, so still that Lance almost can’t hear the slow and controlled rhythm of his breath. The silence holds and turns slightly awkward.

Lance gives him a little shrug. “Right. Good talk.”

When he turns to leave Shiro reaches out to grab him again. Lance moves before he really thinks about it, twisting under Shiro’s arm as his hand slides up to Shiro’s elbow. The soft squeak of Shiro’s boots across the floor has him moving again, shifting his weight behind Shiro’s hip, and with an almost gentle movement, throws Shiro across the hallway. 

Shiro hits the far wall with a reverberating thud.

 _That was really beautiful, Coolkid_ Lapsed Pacifist says admiringly. _Textbook, really._

 _Thanks_ , Lance thinks, feeling just a little stunned. _Are you helping?_

There’s an uncomfortable moment where Lapsed Pacifist laughs inside his head. It feels like something tickling all down his spine with cool fingers. _Coolkid, I’m a voice in your head. Telekinesis is not in my bag of party tricks._

 _Hm._ he thinks back with as much skeptical disbelief as he can muster.

Aloud he says: “I didn’t actually mean to throw you that hard. Jeez, Shiro, I thought with your training-obsessed boyfriend back you’d, like, at least maintain, but if you are falling down on the job to the point that _I_ can throw you around like a rag doll maybe we should stage an intervention or something.” He pauses to dramatically overthink the statement. “Or, wait, are you guys fucking too much to train?” He presses a hand against his chest in overdone scandal. “Shiro!”

There’s no response and silence fill the hallway like slow moving water. It drags on long enough that Lance squirms, nervous and increasingly worried. He tilts his head listening for … something. Anything.

There’s not even the faintest whisper of cloth, just Shiro’s breathing—slow and slightly hitching—and his irregular heartbeat. 

“Ah shit,” Lance sighs before he moves slowly to where he can hear Shiro breathing. He slides his fingers down the wall, folding into an awkward squat as he feels his way to Shiro’s crumpled shoulder. He feels along Shiro’s shoulder, frowning slightly, until he finds the graceful arch of his neck. Lance checks for the tell-tale bump of a head injury, anything, a worried frown pulling at his lips. “Please don’t be dead,” he says to Shiro’s prone body. “Keith will kill me, and I have put up with entirely too much bullshit to be killed now.”

“Keith won’t kill you,” Shiro says, clearly amused.

“SONUBITCH,” Lance shrieks and hurdles backward fast enough to knock his head hard against the opposing wall. He curls up, clutching his head. “Fucker!”

“So, you really are blind,” Shiro says like he’s noting the colour of someone’s dress.

Lance uncurls enough to glare at about where he thinks Shiro might be. “What the actual and entire fuck, Shiro!” He barks. “Did you think I was faking it for a laugh?!”

He can hear Shiro sit up and brush down his uniform like he’s playing for time. Lance continues to glare at him.

 _Ah,_ says his hitchhiker. _If you want that glare to be effective, look up about two feet._

Lance snaps his glare up and he can hear Shiro sigh.

 _And you just let me get ambushed like that?!_ he thinks furiously. Lance can feel the blush blooming over his cheeks and that just makes him angrier. 

_I wanted to see what would happen,_ it says with perfect calm. Lance thinks back a long string of profanity that would’ve certainly had his abuela washing his mouth out with soap if she ever heard it. Lapsed Pacifist just laughs and says: _Inventive!_


	5. New Rules (count em)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> self indulgent dancer au fic that I never really got moving on. Never gonna come back to.

New Rules (count ‘em)

i. (out of my mind, out of my mind)

The summer heat makes the air ripple in the parking lot like steam from a simmering pot—invisible waves off the asphalt that steals the breath right out of your lungs and feels like it crushes the life out of everything green and growing. 

Allura makes a face at it, loathe to open the car door and leave what little cool air her poor, ancient Honda can produce in the face of an LA heatwave. She can feel sweat beading up her spine just looking at the bare twenty meters of heat and asphalt between her and the studio doors. Her hands tighten on the fraying handles of her dance bag, on the condensation slick Starbucks cup (you’ll take her iced triple shot dirty chais from her over her dead body) and blows out a breath that makes the wisps of hair framing her face flutter. 

“Okay, girl, get your butt moving,” she tells herself sternly. Then whines deep in the back of her throat because, oh gods, does it look miserable and hot out there. 

She jerks, fist moving before her thoughts, when her car door pops open and a very male body plops itself into her passenger seat. Shiro catches the punch before she can break his nose, and grins at her. She tugs on her fist, but he holds it steady, thumb running over her knuckles when she pouts at him.

“Trying to psyche yourself up to go into the studio?” He asks, looking as cool and put together as a runway model on the catwalk. Allura hates him a little for that, knowing that she already looks like an overheated mess and she hasn’t even stepped out of the cool safety of her car yet.

“Studio isn’t the problem,” she tells him tartly, then whines in a tone she knows is pathetic but can’t stop herself. “It’s the parking lot that I can’t stand.” She pokes him in the ribs when he laughs at her. “Make Coran give me a better parking space.”

“One: aren’t you from Trinidad?” Shiro asks, batting pretty grey eyes at her when she snarls at him. “And two: you’re Coran’s niece.”

“Being Coran’s niece means he won’t give me any ‘special privileges’,” she explains with air quotes. 

Shiro makes a sympathetic noise, but she can see the laughter lurking at the corners of his eyes and the quirk of his mouth, and sulks at him. “I’m not laughing at you,” he says with his hands up in the universal ‘don’t hit me’ gesture. “I’m laughing with you.”

Allura waves a hand in front of her face. “And what part of me is laughing?” She snipes. “This is serious. I can’t go out in that heat. It kills me. It _kills_.”

She gets a long once over before Shiro cocks his head to one side and grins. “You poor thing,” he croons, his tone full of false concern. “I’ll help you.”

Allura lunges for him, but he eels out of her hands like the little (big, ridiculously muscled) sneak that he is and is out the car door before she can grab him. She slams the door lock into place as he vaults over the hood of her Honda. She points at him and draws a thumb over her throat. If he’s put a dent in her baby that threat is no joke. Shiro just laughs harder at her. And then produces the spare set of keys she’d given him gods only know how long ago.

“Noooo,” she wails, clinging to the car door handle like a drowning woman. Shiro pops it open and catches her with one arm when she gets flung forward. He scoops her up and slings her over one shoulder, trots to the studio with her hanging over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, spitting at him like an angry cat. 

“I hate you,” she tells him, full of petulant fury, when he sets her down gently. 

He pats her on the head, yanking his hand back just in time when she snaps her teeth at him, and hands her dance bag over. “I love you, too.”

“Allura!” Coran calls, head popping out of the office door, before she can strangle him. “Did Shiro tell you that you’ll be taking over the heels master class?”

Allura turns to Shiro and cocks her head to the side slowly. “No,” she says, her voice the even calm of the sea right before a storm comes and drowns your sorry ass. “He neglected to say that.”

“Ah, well!” Coran chirps as he disappears into his office. “I’m sure that can adjust Nyma’s course plan.”

She can’t help the expression of distaste that steals across her face at that. Fucking _Nyma_. Of course, it was. There was some sort of rule of the universe that if something was going to go wrong in her life and add more work it was going to be because Nyma Nguessen could not get her shit together.

Shiro bops her nose lightly. “Your jealousy is showing.”

“I’m not jealous,” she snaps. “I dislike people who can’t keep their life together long enough to get their work done.”

He makes a non-committal humming noise in the back of his throat before waving a stack of papers. “Sure, you might want to look over the list of registrants for the master class before you stick to that as your story.”

She narrows her eyes at him and he smiles sweetly back at her, long inured against her temper and threats by virtue of overexposure. Snatching the registration forms from him, she riffles through them, and arches a brow at one name. “Your best friend is taking a heels master class? What the hell kind of bribe did you find that finally worked on him? Didn’t he have, like, a twenty-slide power point about how he would snap an ankle and his neck if he tried even the simplest move?”

Shiro laughs and shakes his head. “That’s not the interesting name in there.”

Allura clutches the papers to her chest and stares at him, mouth falling open in dawning horror. “No.”

He shrugs. “Just look.”

She thumbs through the papers with speed born of terrified desperation. And then she finds it, written in a blocky script she’d thought she’d scrubbed from her memory. She bites down on her lip, worries it between her teeth before letting it pop back out with a soft, distressed sound. “Why does the universe hate me?”

Shiro pats her shoulder with amused sympathy. “Maybe it’s a second chance.”

“At ripping my heart out,” she asks with more bitterness than two years and complete silence should call for. “No thanks.”

Because staring back up at her, innocuous and benign in terrible handwriting was the one name she really did not want to see: Lance Espinosa.

She’s got the vague sense that the universe is laughing and an even more specific sense that Takashi Shirogane was _definitely_ laughing at her. She glowers at him. “You knew,” she hisses, and he sidles around the edge of the greeter’s desk like it would protect him. “You knew this would happen.”

“Allura,” he says full of reasonable calmness, but she could see the corners of his eyes crinkling the way they only did when he really wanted to laugh but knew that she’d remove his balls if he did. “How could I possibly know how this would work out? And even if I did, why would I laugh?”

She advances on him in a slow predator’s pace, a lioness stalking something small, fat, and very stupid. “Because,” she purrs in a tone that has most sane men running. “You’re Matt’s best friend—his roommate!—and there is literally nothing he doesn’t tell you, and he and … _that man_ are thick as thieves. You’re friends with Nyma—traitor—and know everything she does. You know I’m the only one who can teach a master class in that time slot. You knew.”

Shiro grins at her, cheeky and confident in their long friendship. “You’re going to have to use his name, sweetheart. He’s signed up for the whole session.” Then he sighs. “And Nyma’s a sweet girl. Her and Rolo are getting married, be nice.”

Allura seethes at him. Blows out a huffy breath, crosses her arms over her chest, and glowers harder at him. “You’re a traitor.”

He slides out from behind the desk and presses a kiss to her forehead. “You need to get over this.”

“I _am_ over this,” she says and will fight anyone who says her tone is sulky. 

He tucks lose strands of hair behind her ears. “No, no you really are not,” he replies, his tone soft, eyes even softer. “Neither of you are and I’m getting tired of watching you two destroy yourselves over it.”

“I’m not destroying myself,” she snaps, but lets him tug her into an easy hug, press her head against a muscled shoulder, and blow out a slightly wet breath. “Why are you gay? This would be so much easier if you weren’t.”

Shiro laughs and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Sorry?”

She sulks a little longer, luxuriating in his indulgence of her temper tantrum. “Even if you were into girls, you’d be into girls like Acxa, and while I may have homicidal tendencies, I control them far better than that.”

That gets her a laugh she can feel reverberate through his entire chest. “Keith isn’t that bad,” Shiro scolds. “You are being melodramatic.”

Allura waves a hand that encompasses her entire being. “Dancer,” she says. “Melodrama is part and parcel of the entire persona.”

“ _I’m_ not melodramatic,” Shiro says, scowling petulantly.

She can’t help it. Allura laughs right in his face. “Who was the person that called me in full freak out because he burnt brownies?”

“Those were for our six-month anniversary—”

“Had a meltdown because he couldn’t get the exact right seats at Gabi James?”

“He just finished linear algebra! We needed to celebra—”

“Has called me four times in the past week at o’fuck you to panic that maybe you’re moving too fast asking him to move in together?”

Shiro sulks. “It’s a big deal!”

Allura sighs and pats his ridiculously muscled arm gently. “It is. Moving in together is a very big deal,” she soothes. A little light bulb goes off in her head and she gives Shiro a sly look. “I have a proposal.”

“Why do I feel like Faustus suddenly confronted with Mephistopheles?” Shiro asks rhetorically.

Allura swats him. “I’ll help you apartment hunt _and_ I’ll help you break the news to Matt, if!” She holds up one perfectly manicured finger. “You help me with the choreography for the master class.”

He gives her a look full of distrust and skepticism that she finds, quite frankly, a little insulting. “What’s the catch?”

“Can’t I just want your help?” She demands, giving him a face full of outrage and insult, then batts long lashes at him. “Nyma just dropped an entire session worth master classes. I need a little help.”

“Allura, love, light of my life, you would rather eat your pair of Louboutin’s than ask for help. You would rather let your hair air dry and turn into a medusa like mess than ask for help. You would rather walk out of your apartment without your eyebrows done than ask for help,” Shiro says, ticking off each example with a finger. “Don’t batt your lashes at me, I know better.”

She makes a face at him. “I want to do duet choreography.”

“And?” He prods, because he knows her and she knows he knows her.

She makes a face at him, leans back on her hands, cocks her head to the side and looks as cute as she knows how. “I want to do choreo to Tinashe’s “Company” and you’re the only one in the studio who could make it work.”

Allura watches Shiro turn that one over in his head and gets a little frisson of worry down her spine when he gives her a deeply disapproving look. “You’re writing choreography just to upset Lance.”

She scoffs. “I wouldn’t.”

“You would,” he corrects gently, calmly, with all the assurance of an elementary school teacher dealing with a recalcitrant toddler.

“Alright, maybe a little,” Allura concedes because she dares anyone to withstand the full force of Shiro’s disapproval face. It cannot be done. She knows it. She’d like to see anyone try so she can bet against them and take home bank.

Shiro sighs at her—his disapproval a physical thing she could pet like a cat. “I am not helping you upset your ex. Lance doesn’t deserve that.”

Allura makes a face at him and hisses. “ _Traitor_.”

That gets her an eyeroll more expressive than Emily Carr painting. It should be framed and shared with posterity as the epitome for the gesture. “You need to move past this.”

She waves a hand in front of her, encompassing her entire body. “This is me moving past this,” she argues, then bites her bottom lip, looks up at him through her lashes. “Please?”

That gets her a deeply unimpressed look and an eyeroll. “I’m gay, Bambi, the big eyes and pouting aren’t going to get you anywhere. Try it on Matt.”

Allura blinks, momentarily derailed, pulls back and frowns at him. “Why would I try the bambi eyes on Matt?”

Shiro’s smile slides from ‘being charming and comforting’ into ‘making trouble’ and Allura’s eyebrows try to hike themselves into her hairline. She is definitely missing something in this interaction. 

“You might get a discount on your next tattoo?” Shiro suggests with innocence as fake as sorority girl’s Halloween school girl outfit.

She snorts—in an entirely cute and lady-like fashion and she will punch anyone who says otherwise—and rolls her eyes. “Oh, please,” she says, waving off the suggestion with a flick of her nails. “Your bestie likes precisely two things in this universe: tattoos and his little sister. We have a better chance at finding purple alien cats than we do of Matt giving out discounts for his work.”

Shiro laughs softly, as if at a joke that only he knows the punch line—and she thinks for a moment of punching him. “He likes more than that,” he says. “You’d be surprised.”

Allura makes a rude noise, hoists her dance bag over one shoulder, cocks a hand on a hip and gives him an arch look. “Oh, I forgot. He also likes skateboarding.”

“And those little fish taco things Hunk makes,” Shiro says as he follows after her.

“ _Everyone_ likes those little fish taco things that Hunk makes,” Allura corrects, then smooths a hand down her stomach with dismay. She’s getting a little bit … soft thanks to Hunk’s side project with the food cart. “They are a menace.”

“Truth.”

She spins on one heel and walks backwards, grinning up at her best friend while he narrows his eyes at her in suspicion. 

“You do realize it will take more than just bribing Matt with tacos from Hunk’s food cart to get him to forgive you for flaking out on him about the lease with zero warning,” she asks. 

Shiro fidgets minutely, a tiny little shift of guilt.

“You know you need my help,” she sings.

“He’ll forgive me,” Shiro argues, but he looks uncertain. “He’s a romantic at heart.”

Allura scoffs. “He’s not that much of a romantic. _No one_ is that much of a romantic.”

Shiro puts a hand to his heart. “He wouldn’t stand in the way of true love. He knows Keith and I are meant to be.”

“Matt will hang you with your ballet tights if you leave him to on short notice to find an apartment in downtown LA,” Allura retorts. “And you know it.”

Shiro eyes her. “That … might be true. But I’m still not gonna help you write choreo just to hurt your ex.”

“I’m not doing to _just_ hurt my ex,” Allura argues. “It’s just an exciting side benefit.”

“Bambi. No.”

 

   
“Yo.” 

Matt doesn’t bother to look up at Shiro’s greeting—his hands too busy flying over a sketchbook. He’s got two clients the next morning, both with only the vaguest of ideas of what they wanted but with deep enough wallets and grand enough ambitions that Matt’s willing to work with them with only minimal bitching. 

“Yo,” he calls back, raising an idle hand in greeting. 

“Hold this,” Shiro says, and without any further warning he finds himself with a lap full of sulking Latina—white hair a mess, contrasting perfectly with her dark skin, and smelling faintly of jasmine and coffee. He blinks at Allura, who folds her arms and pouts.

“Um?” He asks eloquently.

“Shiro won’t help me with my master class,” she explains, still sulking, and curls up tighter in his lap. 

Matt looks up at his roommate as he drops his dance gear into the washing machine. “Um?”

“Nyma had to drop the heels master class,” Shiro explains, shaking out a pair of sweats, giving them an experimental sniff and then making a face. “Coran asked Allura to pick it up.”

“Asked,” Allura sniffs, making finger quotes around the word. 

“And now she wants me to help with choreography,” Shiro finishes. Then he points at Allura. “No.”

Allura makes a face at this, apparently content to just … sit in Matt’s lap indefinitely. She blinks big, blue eyes up at him and gives him a painfully sad face. “He’s being mean to me.”

A light is trying to turn on in Matt’s head around the words ‘heels master class’ in connection with ‘Nyma’ but it’s hard for him to think around a lapful of Allura being sad. He looks up at Shiro and blinks. “Why won’t you help her with her master class? You always have before.”

Allura slaps a hand on Matt’s thigh, sending a jolt through him. “I said that! See!” She points at Shiro. “Matt agrees with me.”

Shiro sighs. “I am not helping you design choreography just to make your ex squirm.”

The lightbulb finally goes off for Matt and he feels his stomach swoop and then plummet right for his toes. “The heels master class set for the eighth?” He asks in a low voice. “That one?”

Shiro gives him a slow, smug smile. “That’s the one.”

Matt looks down at Allura who blinks back up at him. “You’re teaching it now?”

She pulls a face. “Yes.”

Matt’s mind shorts out a moment, not at all sure how to connect Allura—cute and sulking in his lap—with the dance class he’s been dreading since Lance managed to finagle him into registering for it. He looks up at Shiro and know all his horror and existential dread is stamped across his face like a brand. His former—definitely former—best friend smiles back at him sweetly.

“But,” his voice cracks in a deeply embarrassing manner, one that hasn’t happened to him since he was thirteen and all awkward limbs and more awkward emotions. “Why can’t Nyma teach it?”

Because if he has to sit there and deal with one of Lance’s exes he’d rather it be the one that Lance isn’t still hung up on the way that white hangs on rice. 

The cute ex who gets drunk in his apartment and mopes like a teenager after her first break up.

The ex with a vicious sense of humor and an even sharper sense of justice. 

The ex with legs that manage to be longer than Lance’s and a firm ass currently pressed right in his lap.

Matt grabs the urge to groan and drags it into a box, stomps on it until it fits, locks it, and glares at Shiro who—he knows like he knows black work and how to do switch kick, and so he knows in the depths of his soul that Shiro is fucking with him—looks fit to die from swallowed laughter. 

“Because she’s a flakey bitch?” gripes Allura, and she curls tighter into Matt’s lap until her head is tucked under his chin, and she presses into his chest like she’s always been meant to be there. He slots an arm around her waist out of muscle memory and tries to not die quietly. He gives his best friend his best ‘I’m killing you later’ face when Shiro snickers at him. 

Shiro flicks a thumb against her nose, making her wrinkle it in a disturbingly cute way. Like, oh no. Allura, no. Go back to your room and think about what you have done. You have no right. No right at all to be cute and long-legged in his lap. 

“Because Nyma is getting married and her schedule is complicated,” Shiro says gently while Allura snaps her teeth at him and hisses like an irate kitten.

Matt prays for strength from any deity that might be listening when she tucks her face against his neck and whines low in her throat. “She’s a _flake_.”

“Um,” he says with even more eloquence than the last two times he tried out that particular conversational gambit. He flips his roommate off when Shiro snickers at him.

Allura shifts in his lap, winds slender arms with the devil’s own strength in them around his waist, and smashes her face against his shirt. He’s gonna have marks from her make-up, he knows. “You know she’s a flake,” she whines into his collarbones. “Make Shiro do choreo with me.”

Matt looks down at her where she’s pressed up against him, delicate and sad, and then looks up at Shiro. “What’s wrong with doing choreography with Allura?” He asks, dread coiling in his stomach like a living thing eating out his guts. There’s an answer lurking there, like a monster under the waves, that threatens to yank apart his fragile feelings—and maybe his tenuous sense of sanity. “You guys always dance together.”

It’s easier to deal with Allura dancing with his roommate—his very gay roommate—than with any of the other incredibly talented dancers at Altea Dance. Easier to deal with watching her wrap those legs around their waists, slide down their bodies, and make eyes that can cause blood to turn to liquid fire at fifty yards. The idea of having to take a heels class—already a recipe for massive public humiliation (when will he learn to tell Lance no? Never, that’s when)—with Allura being seductive and devastating on someone else makes his heart seize like an engine without oil. Every piece of it shattering.

The idea of having to deal with _Lance’s_ reaction makes what little of his heart remains curl into a tiny ball and weep. He turns huge eyes on his best friend, who promptly scowls at him.

‘ _Please_ ,’ he mouths, eyes filling with desperate pleading. Puppies have nothing on him. Little match girls are rank amateurs. Every piece of him tailored to reach into Shiro’s heart and stomp on all the buttons marked ‘protect your best friend from all harm.’ Shiro sighs. ‘ _Please!_ ’

Allura pulls her knees up until she’s a tiny ball in his lap, face still smooshed into his collarbones, but he feels her shift a little and knows that she’s giving Shiro a look through her lashes. Matt can imagine the look. Big blue eyes half-hidden by her hair and his shoulders, her mouth pulling into a pout, bottom lip sticking out just asking to be bitten. 

Matt closes his eyes and counts to ten. Backwards. In three languages. Opens his eyes and begs with every fiber of his being.

“You two,” Shiro announces with exhausted finality. “Are pathetic.”

Allura lifts one arm from where she’d wrapped it around Matt’s waist and makes a little ‘come here’ gesture with two fingers. Shiro sighs but comes within her range. Matt lets her slide out of his lap with more grace than any human has a right to and tries force his face into neutral blankness—to hide the regret at the loss of her warmth. The way Shiro’s eyebrows hitch up and smirk slithers around the edges of his mouth, Matt knows he fails. 

Chewing on his bottom lip to try hide his expression he turns back to his sketchbook and waves a hand at the two of them in what he hopes is a nonchalant manner. “You two figure it out,” he says like it wasn’t a matter of life or death for his sanity. “Stop dragging me into it.”

Shiro cocks an eyebrow at him over Allura’s head, incredulous and amused. Matt buries his head in his sketchbook and refuses to make eye contact with either of them. But listening to them is distracting enough. The half-finished sketch stares back at him mockingly—if a pencil sketch could mock—and he worries his bottom lips. Flips his pencil through his fingers, shifts on his seat, and listens to them like an eavesdropping creep.

“That’s hardly material for a heels class,” Shiro argues, and his tone shifting from teasingly stubborn to legitimate disagreement. “That’s more the speed of your advanced hip-hop classes.”

“But it could work for a heels class,” Allura wheedles. “Just listen to the first couple of bars.”

“Bambi, I have been out to the clubs lately, trust me I’ve heard ‘Company’ played a million times, just like everyone else,” Shiro replies and his voice is drier than Mojave. “Heels and duet choreography doesn’t work. Not for the first session, not even for a master class.”

Matt breathes out a quiet sigh of relief. In his internal ranking of manageable scenarios for this shit-show that Lance has dragged him into runs from:

1) Allura-doing-choreo-with-unknown-dude, to;

2) Allura-doing-choreo-with-Shiro, to;

3) no-fucking-duet-choreo-please-and-thank 

in ascending order of ‘things that will make Matt’s little heart explode.’ 

He can probably make it through a class with just Allura in heels. 

Probably.

Matt flips the pen around in his fingers, sketches out a few lines of a ship, frowns at it like it’s personally insulted the honor of his entire family and his cow. Listens to them bicker amicable and cute back and forth, patter as easy as rain on a roof. Imagines Allura’s excited expression as she argues, waving her hands around to make her point, bites hard on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from looking.

He’s cool. He’s focused. He’s got shit to do that does not involve staring at his best friend’s cute _other_ best friend.

“Try ‘Buttons,’ Bambi,” Shiro suggests and Allura makes a contemplative humming sound that pulls at things low in Matt’s belly that he really does not want to investigate too closely. 

He chances a sideways glance at the pair of them from under his bangs. They’re sprawled together across the couch in that boneless manner that only dancers seem to have, sharing headphones to Allura’s phone. Matt tries not to hate Shiro for the way Allura lies slack and comfortable across his chest, fingers tapping along his collarbones as she listens to whatever song blares out of the earbuds. 

“We could do floor work with this one,” she murmurs, low and intimate, and Matt snaps his eyes back to his sketchbook when Shiro catches his gaze with a raised eyebrow. “But it doesn’t really work for duet choreography.

“They aren’t coming for duet choreo, Bambi,” Shiro says soothingly. “Gotta keep your class dynamics in mind.” Allura makes a rude sound that makes Shiro laugh, a deep rumble that rattles through the room.

“Fuck ‘em,” Allura says dismissively. “They’re signing up for a master class at the best studio in LA. They know what they’re getting into.”

Matt sticks his pencil in his mouth and chews on it to keep from whimpering. He most definitely did _not_ know what he was getting into. He entertains fantasies of strangling Lance. Which is definitely a change of pace from his normal fantasies involving Lance. He desperately wants to put his face in his hands and scream. Maybe cry a little.

“Matt?” 

At his best friend’s soft call his head snaps up and around like a dog at a whistle. Shiro gives him a grin that he knows he’s gonna want to punch off his smug face as soon as he opens up his mouth. He narrows his eyes at his roommate. Shiro’s sweet smile slides into something smug and self-satisfied like a cat with the last bit of cream.

“Have you bought your heels yet?” Shiro asks with concern so fake it could be a diet sweetener.

Matt bites back on the immediate ‘no and fuck you’ response that bubbles up his throat as natural as breathing. “Not yet,” he grinds out. “I was going to go shopping closer to the date.”

Allura rolls up and off Shiro’s chest in one smooth movement, her hair finally tumbling loose from the messy knot she’d had it bound up into, and beaming. She bounds up to him with a wide grin, her eyes alight with a delight that makes him immediately suspicious. “You’re heels shopping?!”

“Girl,” Shiro warns from the couch, but doesn’t bother to roust himself. “Don’t you dare.”

Allura blows him a raspberry over his shoulder before she grabs Matt’s hands in both of hers and clutches them to her chest. “Tell me where you are going shopping. Oh! Have you decided on a brand?” She waves away his stuttered reply with one hand. “Never mind you won’t even know. Go get a pair of Pleasers. Your feet will thank you.”

He blinks at the sudden surge of words. Stutters incoherently a little. Tugs at his hands, but she’s got them in a grip that would shame a steel trap. He blinks at where she has them smashed against her chest and says dumbly. “I was going to go shopping with Lance.”

He can feel her hands spasm around his and wants to punch himself straight in the mouth.

“Oh,” Allura says quietly. Drops his hands as if burned. “Of course.”

Matt stares at her feeling about as tall as a midget ant as her mouth tries to smile but get stuck at something closer to ‘my heart is dying but I’m trying not to show it’ and his mouth promptly goes on autopilot. Does not pass go. Does not collect 200 dollars. Straight for verbal idiocy. Anything to keep her from making that face. 

“I mean,” he says as her eyes flick up to his. “He fucking owes me.” Her lips quirk into something that might be a kissing cousin to a smile. “He’s the one who dragged me into this and you know I can’t dance.”

She cocks her head to the side, snow-pale hair cascading over her shoulders and he swallows the urge to plunge his hands into those waves to see if they are as soft as they look. “I know you think you can’t dance,” she tells him with sweetness that he doesn’t deserve. “Your head gets in the way.”

He waves his hands like he’s been electrocuted and then crosses them over his chest to keep himself from doing anything else stupid. Leans back so he won’t slide into her personal space as if dragged there by the gravitational pull of lust and longing. 

“Nice of you to say,” he tells her. Because it is nice of her to say. Allura is nothing if not ever sweet to him. Gentle and caring in ways that makes him want to crawl into a hole and drag the earth over him because he doesn’t deserve it. “But when they were handing out ‘muscular coordination’ and ‘grace’ I was taking my dick out for an exploratory test drive. Twice!”

Allura blinks, splutters and then giggles before swatting his arm. “Matt!”

“It’s true,” Shiro offers from the couch and Allura tosses him a disapproving frown over her shoulder.

“I will not let you tear yourself down like this,” she tells him severely and he can’t help but love her for it. “I’ve seen you skateboard. If you can do all of that you can dance. It’s all the same general principles.”

Matt laughs before he can stop himself. Tells himself not to relish the way she smiles back at him. “It really isn’t.”

“It is,” she insists, turns to his roommate who raises an eyebrow at them and demands: “tell him!”

Shiro laughs, making both of them scowl at him for different reasons. “It kinda is and isn’t,” he hedges and they both roll their eyes at him. “But the skillsets are related.”

Allura makes a rude noise at him. “That was a cop-out answer.”

Matt nods. “It kinda is.”

They both get a handwave. “It isn’t,” Shiro defends, pushing himself up the couch to frown at them. “You haven’t been trained, true,” he says holding up one finger. “But,” he holds up another. “All the balance and body control you have developed will help you in dance.”

Matt rolls his eyes. “Yeah, fuck no,” he says. “This is a bet designed by Lance so he can laugh at me.”

Once again he wants to punch himself in the mouth when Allura goes still, as if a switch was flipped that killed all of her natural vivaciousness, next to him. He gives his best friend big eyes over her shoulder, trusting Shiro to dig him out of this hole.

“How _did_ Lance get you to agree to a dance class,” Shiro asks with every appearance of simple curiosity.

Matt breathes in as Allura turns to him, curious and questioning. Matt breaths out, makes the executive decision to throw Lance right under that bus. No shame, no remorse. 

“I … maybe made a stupid bet,” he says, draws it out in a way he knows Allura will eat up with a spoon. She turns to him, a delighted smile creeping across her mouth. “But really it’s because Lance is an idiot.”

“He is,” Allura breathes with more vehement agreement than his statement demands, but he’ll take it over her being sad.

Shiro snorts, dragging their attention back to him. “Lance being dumb is an everyday occurrence. I don’t think Pidge has even once managed to write down a number other than zero on her little counter thing.” Matt loves his sister and she absolutely proves that his sense of humor is genetic. “Not one that normally gets you to sign up for a dance class. Something I’ve been trying to get you to do since, roughly, forever.”

Matt shrugs. “We went skateboarding,” he explains and tries not to get lost in the way her eyes twinkle in anticipatory glee. “And Lance fell all over his ass. Like, couldn’t do the simplest of tricks.”

He grins at the memory. Lance’s hands grabbing a hold of his arms. Lance’s breath stuttering profanity against his ear as Lance held him and tried to get used to the feeling of the board underneath him. Lance’s little frown of concentration as he learned to adjust his center balance. The feeling of contented pleasure at Lance trying to learn to skateboard for other reason than the fact that Matt liked it. His willingness to look like a complete idiot and subject himself to Pidge’s scathing commentary just because it was Matt’s favorite hobby.

“You set him up,” Shiro accused and Matt presses a hand against his heart and blinks big, innocent eyes at him. That earns him an eye roll. “Don’t play, you know you did.”

“He said he could do any trick I could do,” Matt defends, flutters his lashes at his roommate, but can’t contain the grin that curls across his face—sly and smug. “How was _I_ to know that he’d face-plant trying to do a 540 flip?”

Allura giggles, bites on her knuckles to contain it, and then giggles around her knuckles some more, going pink across the bridge of her nose. Matt bites the inside of his mouth and fights to keep from ducking his head like a love-struck teenager. He’s in his twenties, dammit, way past this nonsense. 

“Given what you put him through,” Shiro sighs. “It’s impressive that he’s still your friend.”

Matt snorts, crosses his arms over his chest and eyes his brother, unsure of how much Shiro is being serious or fucking with him. “He does it to himself.”

“You help him do it to himself,” Shiro scolds.

“There is no situation that Lance will not find a way to make worse for himself,” Matt argues. Allura nods vehemently next to him. Shiro rolls his eyes at both of them. “Besides, he got me back by talking me into this class. Why I agreed I have no idea.”

Shiro arches an eyebrow at him and gives him a look—or more precisely a Look. One that says he knows exactly how Lance got Matt to agree to a heels master class, the same way Lance gets Matt to agree to pretty much any bad idea that floats through his pretty head. Because Matt is physically and chronically incapable of saying no to Lance Espinosa. 

It’s been tested. 

Written down and verified. 

Peer reviewed. 

Science, bitches, it has proven that Matt Holt is a certifiable sucker when it comes to that boy. 

The only saving grace to the entire situation is Lance’s continued obliviousness—how that worked out Matt isn’t sure but by gods is he grateful for it. Last thing his weak and pathetic heart needs was Lance figuring out the iron grip he had on it. Allura shoots him a side-eyed glance that suggests that she knows just as well as his best friend exactly how bad he has it for Lance and finds the entire thing amusing. Which is better than the alternative.

“But how exactly did he get you to agree,” Allura asks, voice and face innocent but he can see the mischief lurking in her eyes. He’s not sure how he’s getting fucked with, but he can sense the fuckery impending.

“We made a bet after I laughed at him,” Matt says with a certain degree of trepidation. 

Allura slaps her hand on her thigh, spins, and points to Shiro. “Twenty bucks, pay up!”

Shiro sighs, whines at Matt: “Do you guys have to be so predictable?”

“You _bet_ on me?” Matt sputters, incredulous.

Allura ignores him as she flounces up to Shiro, holding out her hand and making little grabbing motions. Shiro gives him a dry look as he shells out a twenty. “This is your fault. I should make you pay it.”

“How the fuck do you work that one out?” Matt asks, stuck awkwardly between amused and insulted. 

“You’re the predictable one,” Shiro says with an arched brow while Allura crows over the twenty he drops in her hand. Matt ignores her little happy wiggle with an act of monumental willpower.

“What,” Matt snaps. “Was I supposed to just _cave_?”

Both Shiro and Allura give him a slow once over and an arching eyebrow and he hates them more than a little for being beautiful and apparently above simple things like human emotions. Rather than dignify their regal disdain with a response he flips them both off and returns to his sketchbook with a grumble.

///   
Lance isn’t sure which deity he’s managed to piss off, but he’s sure he’s earned the divine wrath of at least one given the way his head throbs in time with his heartbeat and Matt Holt looks at him with the disdain born of the simple fact that he has never actually failed anything in his entire life.

There’s something both distressing and hot about a man who can complete a PhD program in astrophysics before he sees the wrong side of twenty-five, decide that, nah, this shit’s too easy, and then build an entire new career as a tattoo artist because his sister mentioned that she maybe wanted to do that rather than follow in their parents’ illustrious footsteps. And gods forbid that Matt Holt not move heaven and earth to give his baby sister precisely what she wants. 

Some people, Lance thinks grumpily, have an excess of talent and it’s just flat rude that Matt has to flaunt his around like this. 

“Did you even bother to look at the instructors,” Matt’s bitching as he hauls Lance along by one arm, cruelly ignoring Lance’s status as an invalid, just one step from Death’s door, really. Suffering the hang-over of doom over here, gods, Matt. But apparently Pidge is the Holt sibling that got any of the compassion (which says something, really, about the Holt siblings) because Matt ignores him the way he ignores everything that gets in his way. “Because if you had you’d have seen it was fucking Nyma.”

Lance sighs like the wind through the bellows a mighty forge. “Nyma is a nice girl. We get along just fine. She’s gonna marry Rolo. What’s everyone’s problem with her?”

Matt pauses in his vicious quest to kill Lance by dragging him through the mall with its flashing signs, too loud teenagers, and white tiling that makes Lance dissociate at 100 yards. “Because Nyma is marrying Rolo,” Matt bites out, all sharp logic and vicious scorn. “She’s not teaching the master class. _Allura_ is. Which you would know, if you paid attention for longer than thirty seconds.”

Lance freezes. Glaciers form in his veins, climb up his heart, grind it to pieces between ice and stone. “Allura.”

Matt stops, glares, snaps. “Yep.”

The way he makes the ‘p’ pop snaps Lance out of his moment of terror and panic. Defensiveness and snark swing to his defense as sure as the tide. “She wasn’t on the roster at the time we signed up.”

“Well, she is now,” Matt snaps, grabs his wrist, and resumes dragging him through the mall, shoulders tight with some unnamed emotion. “And she’s pissed.”

Lance rolls his eyes. “She’s always pissed.”

Matt shoots him a look under his lashes that makes Lance stumble for a moment—momentary failure of neuron pulse from nerve to muscle. Because, that? That little look of viciousness? Like violence lives right under Matt’s skin, hidden under his veneer of nerdy clumsiness, fucks up Lance very time he sees it. Like something dark and dangerous living in the depths that Matt only sometimes lets out to play.

“She’s got a reason, don’t you think?” Matt not quite growls.

That’s a punch to the gut—that low, snarling tone that promises pain and blood. It makes things low and hot curl in Lance’s belly and fucked if he knows what he’s supposed to do with _that_ feeling.

And it’s honesty that drives Matt. An unflinching assessment of the situation broken down into their component, logical parts and then delivered with heartbreaking simplicity. It’s something Lance likes about the vicious nerd—even when he was all slender bones and sharp words—his unwaveringly realistic assessment of any situation. 

It’s a thing you could trust like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Give Matt Holt the necessary data and he’ll give you a precise and complete assessment—sometimes with a detailed power-point presentation if you’ve annoyed him enough—and twenty step plan for dealing with it.

And literally nothing in the universe annoyed Matt quite like not having all the information. 

Lance wonders, then, briefly, how much of a terrible person he is for not telling Matt—his friend, resident genius, and honestly one of the best people Lance has ever known—to go after Allura. Because if anyone could meet that girl of ambition and ferociousness and terrifying fire on her own terms, it would be Matthew Holt, prettiest nerd you ever did meet.

Pretty terrible, he decides, because there’s not a single solitary chance in hell he’ll even breathe a word of it.

Because there’s only so many things that Lance’s selfish, withered heart can deal with and watching the two of them fall into the slow, fairy-tale perfect love that Lance’s certain they’d find is definitely among them.

So, he follows after Matt, head throbbing in time with his guilty heart, and tries not to enjoy too much the weight of that warm hand on the crook of his elbow, calluses from skateboarding and the tattoo gun rubbing against the delicate skin of his inner arm. (He fails.) Complains as Matt drags him along like a misbehaving child. Acts as obnoxious and petulant as he knows how because otherwise he might get found out. 

Sulks when Matt rolls his eyes and delivers a really impressive Older Brother Rant About Responsibility—like Lance doesn’t know that Matt once lived on hot pockets and gatorade for an entire three months while writing his dissertation.

Pouts when Matt sighs and gives him that little I-am-disappointed-in-you shake. Tries to ignore exactly how good the warmth of Matt’s hand feels across the back of his neck. (And that’s a thing messing Lance up lately: somewhere along the line Matt went from Pidge’s annoying, scrawny, sarcastic brother to this lean, tattooed skater punk with _opinions_ on modern policing. Still sarcastic though.)

Whines when Matt ignores him in favor of consulting some scrap of paper. (Pretends he doesn’t know that pretty, perfect cursive—so neat it could be calligraphy. Pretends every bone in him doesn’t ache at the sight of it. Pretends he doesn’t remember each little love note written in exactly that script.) 

“Do you even know what you’re looking for,” he asks Matt which as much dismissive snark as he can pack into the sentence. It earns him a contemptuous eyeroll. 

“Yes,” Matt responds shortly, the ‘ _you idiot_ ’ at the end of the sentence heavily implied if not actually said. 

Lance makes a grab for the little piece of paper, which Matt prompt tucks close to his chest and snaps his teeth at him, the snake bites set in his lower lip flashing. (And Lance has a lot of thoughts about those deceptively simple rings. Thoughts about how they would feel against his skin, against his tongue if he caught Matt’s pouty lower lip between his teeth, against other things. And there’s a whole line of thoughts that he really shouldn’t be having about the older brother of one of his oldest friends.)

He pouts at Matt, flutters his lashes in his best puppy-dog look that makes Matt consistently melt at hundred paces. “And you won’t show your favorite dancer and baby astrophysicist why?”

“Shiro already knows and if I told Pidge I was shopping for heels she’d laugh herself sick,” Matt replies with all the tartness of a hundred pressed raspberries. 

Lance presses both hands to his chest, gasps in overdone offense. “You _wound_ me.”

Matt cocks his head to the side, eyes shadowed by the messy tangle of wheat-blonde hair. Lance’s fingers itch to comb it straight, to see if would move like silk between his fingers. He shoves his hands in his pockets to try to exercise some measure of control, rocks back on his heels to pretend that he’s cool, he’s ice, he’s not dying inside every time he looks at Matt and wonders if his skin is as soft as it looks.

“I could,” Matt says, slow and thoughtful as if contemplating the logistics of a particularly complicated math problem. “Will, if you keep being obnoxious.”

Lance waggles his fingers at Matt, back at home with the easy banter between them, the endless of give and take of random bullshit and nonsensical commentary. “Yeah, yeah not all of us study krav maga like nerds with something to prove.”

That gets him an expressive eyeroll and thoroughly ignored in favor of charming the salesgirl with the Holt patented combination of innocent social awkwardness and hyper-competence in everything he does. 

And apparently that hypercompetent extended to buying shoes that can only be described as stripper heels. 

“Oh!” The girl gasps in delight as Matt rattles off the brand and make of the shoes he wants to try. “Are you buying for your girlfriend? You’ve really done your homework.”

Matt turns an interesting shade of fire engine red. Lance watches, feeling like all his Christmas have come at once, as the flush bleeds up his ears and along the back of his neck. “Uh,” Matt says, his normal eloquence and sly way with words apparently deserting him. “No. They’re—” Lance chews on his bottom lip to keep from cackling as Matt coughs awkwardly. “They’re for me.”

“Oh,” the girl breathes and looks as thrilled as Lance feels. “Oh, well in that case. We should get your measurements.”

“I know my size,” Matt protests as she grabs his arm and hauls him bodily towards the uncomfortable plastic chairs every shoe store in existence seemed to have. 

“Yes, I’m sure,” the girl says, delight still written across every line of her tiny body. “But your measurements are gonna be different for heels.”

Lance has to bite his lips until they almost bleed to keep from cackling like a sitting hen as Matt’s expression turns as serious as a monk’s transcribing the last words of John the Baptist. Every line of that lean body writ in concentrated focus as he listens to the salesgirl’s somewhat muddled explanation. And Lance is dead. Dying from the concentrated cuteness of how seriously Matt takes this.

Dying from the seriousness with which he’s takes this entire little lark Lance is dragging him on and Lance can’t look at that thought for too long.

Gets hopeful at the thought.

Heart starts the drumbeat of _maybe, maybe, maybe_.

And he knows better than to think that. He’s seen the way Matt watches Allura like she’s the sun rising, all the stars sprawled across the milky way, the moon across still water. He knows where Matt’s heart lays and honestly it’s a miracle enough that he and Matt are even friends given all the shit he put Allura through and he will not ever be grateful for the way Matt stayed by them both. So he takes his foolish heart and shoves it in a basket. Locks it up tight. Tighter. Stuffs it all in a bottle labeled ‘dumb gay feelings’ and flings off a metaphorical cliff. 

“You know,” he says as he leans against the back of the molded plastic chairs—salesgirl scampering off to collect a veritable avalanche of shoe boxes. “You could always do the class in sneakers. Lots of dudes do it.”

“No,” Matt says, face set in stony determination. “I said I would take the heels class. That means heels. Besides, Shiro would never shut up if I chickened out of it now.”

And god forbid Matt Holt, semi-professional bad ass, not do exactly as he said he would do. Lance wants to be offended about that. Indignant over the way Matt manages to be unthinkingly dismissive of the effort any normal human would put into things. But he can’t be, not really. Long association with Matt and his oblivious arrogance, easy superiority in all things, has tempered the edge of offense into something near to affection, bemused familiarity. Besides, Lance thinks to himself, it’s hard to hate Matt for his easy talent in all things when he managed to be so completely unaware that it could even prove the slightest challenge to someone else. 

So, he watches, amused and affectionate, as Matt suffers through salesgirl’s delighted and aggressive attentions. 

Snickers as he executes a perfect catwalk strut in pair after pair of torturous heels that should, by all rights, have him twisting an ankle at the very least. 

Uses snide commentary and off-hand jabs that make Matt snap sarcastic one-liners at him to hide the way interest curls low and hot in his belly. 

“You’re probably gonna want two pairs,” Lance offers from where he’s sprawled across the incredibly uncomfortable molded plastic chairs that are ubiquitous in all shoe stores. Matt shoots him a questioning look. One brow raising into a perfect arch that manages to convey a wealth of skepticism that Lance honestly feels is just flat unfair. “This is a twice a week class and we’ll probably be hitting the drop-ins—or at least _I’ll_ be hitting the drop-ins, you might not be down.”

Matt’s chin immediately goes up and out, a stubborn tilt that says he sees that not-so-subtle challenge and ain’t about to back down any time this century.

This boy, so fucking easy to lead around by the nose sometimes, it’s like he labels all his buttons in foot high, neon letters just for Lance to push. 

Lance shrugs one shoulder, slow and lazy, like it ain’t no thing to him. “Just sayin’.”

Matt narrows his eyes at him before turning back to the breathless salesgirl. “I’ll take two pairs,” he says in that low, so painfully serious voice that just _does_ it for Lance. “And a pair of Capezios.”

The girl squeaks and rushes off to fulfill his request, cheeks flushed glee. Matt stalks over to him, unfairly graceful in towering heels—all long legs and swaying hips and Lance is bitter. He’s resentful. There should be rules. Laws. Something to prevent this sort of thing from being inflicted upon his person. He swallows down the heat and need with practiced determination and quirks an eyebrow.


	6. soul eater AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> honestly, I still love this fic and may come back to it at some point. Maester!Allura and weapon!Lance just make something in my id stupid happy.

Soul Eater AU

It would be easier, Lance thinks, as his meister—former meister—twists her fingers together, mouth pulling down into an awkward, unhappy frown, if they could just tell him the points of misalignment, the pieces that grated within their connection until it—until _he_ \--became unbearable. Instead of this endless repetition of stuttered apologies, guilty glances, and hands that reach for someone else’s touch. 

A rattling stream of well-meaning prattle that better soothes their guilt and embarrassment than his shattered heart. 

“You’re great,” Nyma says, blonde hair gleaming like ripening wheat in the field. It’s pulled high into a bright and bouncy ponytail, a style he loves on her—all clean lines and her sharp profile. He’s not sure why that’s the thing he focuses on as her stuttering words break his heart into tiny pieces. “You’re an amazing weapon and the sweetest guy I know.”

 _But_ , Lance mentally supplies a heartbeat before she draws her next breath.

“But,” she says— _there it is_ , he thinks with more bitterness than he ever lets show across his face. “We don’t really work together. It’s not you,” she rushes to add.

 _It’s me_ , he thinks with self-deprecating sarcasm. He manages to avoid rolling his eyes with a massive force of will.

“I,” she says, face flushing delicately along the fine line of her cheekbones. She never did like admitting weakness, he realizes. “I just can’t handle the strain of you. It’s just. You’re so much.”

Lance nods on reflex, because he knows, head bobbing in recognition. He knows that the demands of his weapon form are crushing on a meister, drawing raw quintessence from their souls to form ammunition in greedy disregard for any limit of meister that dared tried to wield him. Too powerful, too possessive, too overwhelming, too much. He can’t be angry at her because he knows.

 _You’re like a sudden riptide_ , Hunk’d told him once upon a time after a disastrous attempt to partner. _One blink and I’m flung out to sea and drowning_.

“And I’ve met someone else,” Nyma whispers, eyes resolutely glued to her fingers where she wrings her hands in helpless distress.

Lance sighs, looks up at the red spill of the sunset as it sweeps across the sky. It’s as good an explanation as he’s going to get. He’s done this particular song and dance before. Tears and promises that he’ll try harder. That he’ll work _harder_ on his control—try to better keep the instant and crushing force of his Soul Possession locked down tight. Promises that he’ll find a way to curb the needy demands of his soul form. None of them change the inevitable break that’s coming. 

He catches her delicate hands in his own and smiles at her, sweet and forgiving, when she finally looks up at him—tears gathering in her lovely eyes. “Rolo?” He asks.

Nyma sniffles and nods, her expression caught between guilt and that instant, helpless fondness that a meister only shows when they’ve found the weapon that suits their soul down to every last cranny. Fit together like a lock and key. And he can’t stand in the way of that. Might as well try to hold back the tides.

He gives her hands one last squeeze before he lets go and steps back. “I’m glad,” he tells her and digs past his own disappointment and hurt to make himself mean it. “You deserve the perfect weapon.”

Nyma chews on her bottom lip before letting lose a wail that would put any three-year-old to shame and throws her arms around his neck. He pats her heaving back gently. “It would be easier,” she says between gasping sobs. “If you weren’t so _nice!_ ”

“First time I’ve had that used as an insult against me,” he says, reaching for amusement and finding it to his great surprise. 

She pulls back and punches him, lightly, in the side. “You know what I mean.”

He curls dramatically away from her. “First you break up with me and then you punch me for being nice. Damn, Nyma.”

She makes a face at him before reaching out to tuck an errant curl behind his ear. “I would apologize for this, but I’m not sorry. And I know you are going to find someone great. You’ll find someone way more amazing than me.”

Lance smiles at her and says nothing.

\--

“She’s a bitch,” Pidge says and smashes the buttons of the video game controller vindictively, as if she could hurt Nyma via aggressive button mashing.

Lance sighs. On the one hand he appreciates the complete and blind support from his friends—the thoughtless closing of ranks against a perceived enemy—and soaks in the comfort of their unquestioning faith that he had nothing to do with yet another dissolution of the meister-weapon bond. But on the other hand, it put him in the somewhat exhausting position of having to calm Pidge’s flash fire temper. “She’s not,” he says, and even to him his defense sounds rote. “You can’t fight fate.”

Pidge makes a rude sound and then tosses the controller with thoughtless grace to her brother who catches it easily. Her eyes are alight with righteous fury. “I know you’re hopeless romantic, but she should have at least _tried_ to make it work.”

“We spent months trying,” Lance replies. He rubs a hand over his face and through his hair. This is also a conversation he keeps having over and over. That they should have tried harder, been smarter, done something—anything differently. He wonders when the cutoff point is. When you’re supposed to know when you have tried ‘enough’ and just need to admit defeat. He wonders why he never quite seems to recognize when that point’s been reached. “We just didn’t work. She can resist my soul possession, but the rest of it is just too much. I’m too much.”

Pidge makes another frustrated noise and glares at him. “That’s not your fault.”

“It’s not hers either,” Lance says and shrugs one shoulder. “Hunk and I didn’t work out for the same reason. I don’t blame him and I’m not gonna blame Nyma either.”

Meister in question drags him into a bone crushing embrace and Lance lets him maneuver him into an easy cuddle. “I’m sorry for that,” Hunk says, and Lance pats his arm at the open remorse in his tone. “I know you’ll find the right meister.”

Lance wants to roll his eyes at the platitude—he is sick to death of that fucking line—but he can’t really find it in himself to dismiss the earnest emotion in Hunk’s tone. And besides, Hunk-cuddles are high on his list of favorite things, so he pats Hunk’s arm again. “Thanks, dude.”

Pidge rolls her eyes and mutters underneath her breath before prodding her meister’s arm until Hunk moves enough to let her eel between them and shove her whole face right into Lance’s collarbones. “She’s still a bitch,” she says, obstinate voice muffled by Lance’s shirt. “And I will totally fight her if you want.”

“Nyma fights dirty,” Matt comments from his seat on the floor, his attention presumably wholly consumed by the game, but Lance can see the amused quirk of his lips. “And she’s got enough Soul Force to make it hurt.”

Pidge makes a dismissive sound and burrows closer, effectively sandwiching Lance between her and Hunk’s warm bulk. “I can take her.”

Hunk pats her messy hair. “I think I’d get in trouble if my weapons challenged another meister.”

“ _I’m_ not gonna fight Nyma,” Matt says. “I have a functioning sense of self-preservation, thanks.”

“Coward,” his sister says at the same time as Hunk laughs deep and fond. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Like the two of you aren’t completely ride or die. You know the first swing Nyma takes you’ll be right there trying to chew her arm off.”

Matt laughs and shrugs. “True.”

“No fighting Nyma,” Lance rebukes both of them. The Holt siblings are a _menace_ best kept tightly contained. Sometimes he wonders how Professor Holt managed to produce a pair of children who are basically feral when he is such a nice man. Makes Lance wonder, it really does. “I mean, if you are going to fight Nyma for leaving me for another weapon then you’d have to fight both yourself and Hunk for the same thing.”

Pidge is silent for a long time. Long enough that Lance starts feeling a little guilty. It’s a thing none of them really talk about—not a thing any of them really want to talk about. But Hunk’s just the first in a long, long line of meisters who’d found him impossible to partner with. “I’ll fight Hunk,” Pidge says in a squashed but determined voice. Hunk makes a wordless sound of protest. “I’ll fight Matt. I’ll fight myself. I’ll fight _everybody_.”

And that’s basically Pidge Holt in a nutshell: bound and determined to fight the literal universe if that’s what it takes to protect what’s hers. She’d probably win, too.

Lance presses a kiss to her messy hair. “No fighting.”

“I’m a weapon,” she complains without removing her face from where she’s got it mashed against him. “I’m supposed to fight. _You’re_ a weapon. What’s with the passivism?”

“Lance is a lover, not a fighter,” Matt says and shoots Lance a sweet smile over his shoulder. “Right?”

Lance feels his heart go soft and disgustingly gooey. His friends, they were both the best and worst thing that had ever happened to him. “Yeah.”

“So. We’ll go fight Nyma for him,” Matt says nonchalantly, in complete disregard of literally everything he’d said earlier. Pidge makes a crowing noise of triumph against Lance’s collarbones.

“We can totally take the bitch,” she says.

Lance can feel Hunk laughing into his hair and knows he’ll get no support there. “ _No_ fighting Nyma,” he says with as much authority and force as he can fit in his voice. The pair of them laugh—high and sweet and thoroughly alarming.

\---

Pidge calls Nyma out before morning classes—standing on the top of her brother’s shoulders with bullhorn linked to the school’s PA system—and Nyma answers like a glorious Valkyrie made of spite and offended dignity.

Lance would like to point that he did _try_ to stop this. He went against his very nature to _try_ to be the voice of reason. He told her not to do it. Not that it had done a damned bit of good. He’s not sure why he even bothered because this confrontation had been coming as surely as the sunrise.

The congregating students collectively gasp in scandalized delight when Pidge leaps from her brother’s shoulders to smash her fist straight into Nyma’s mouth, smearing her knuckles with blood and maroon lipstick.

“Slut!” Pidge shrieks in vindictive fury.

Nyma pulls herself up to her impressive height, not even swaying a little on her towering heels and drags a thumb through mess staining her lower lip and chin. Her eyes flash with a wicked light as her lips curl in disdain. “I’m the slut?” She purrs. “You were a homewrecker long before I ever showed up. Or did you choose to forget that?”

Lance buries his face in his hands as a great susurration of whispers spring up around him—people telling and retelling the story of how the Holt siblings ‘stole away’ Lance’s first meister. Hunk pats his shoulder even as his own hunch against the press of gleeful gossip at their backs.

“I at least waited until it was clear things weren’t working,” Pidge spits and ducks the testing jab Nyma throws at her, air crackling in its wake with the pressure of her Soul Force. 

“We tried,” Nyma hisses and Lance’s heart twists at sheen of tears he can see blurring her pretty eyes. “I _tried_.”

“If a meister-soul weapon pairing fails,” Pidge says, her voice taking on the cadence of new cadet reciting memorization drills. “It is the fault of meister for entering into a contract with a weapon beyond their power.”

“I _tried!_ ” Nyma wails and kicks Pidge clear across the courtyard.

Lance can feel Hunk trying to make himself smaller as their fellow students eye his friend unvoiced questions and judgement. Lance hates this part of a failed pairing. The bit where everyone blames the meister in question because his soul form is an endless drag on a meister’s energy—feeding off their Soul Force like some sort of vampire until they can’t stand the strain any longer.

While he’s trying to figure out how to break the pair determined to excise their guilt and grief out on each other, Kolivan steps into the courtyard.

He’s big, their professor of legal philosophy and combat readiness, a brick shithouse with probably the sharpest strategic mind of a generation. And both girls completely ignore his presence as if he were nothing more than an ant that had the misfortune to crawl between them. Pidge uses the force of her rebound from where Nyma had kicked her and Kolivan’s shoulder to launch herself back at the meister—screaming bloody fury and death. 

Nyma meets her as she lands, hands coming up to block and grab as she shrieks her own rage.

Lance can see Kolivan blink slow and bemused. He spares a moment of pity for their instructor—it’s got to be an unusual experience to be so completely ignored by a pair of girls half your size as they try to beat seven kinds of hell out of each other. 

Kolivan catches Pidge the next time Nyma sends her flying and holds her by the scruff of the neck. 

“Ladies,” he starts in a voice that quickly turns into an incoherent yelp when Pidge twists in his grip, agile as any cat, and bites him hard enough that he drops her. She’s on Nyma in a flash, the meister’s lips pulled back in a bloody grin and her hands up to meet Pidge’s assault. 

Lance feels it in his soul when Kolivan heaves a massive sigh.

In the end takes both Antok and Ulaz to pry them apart while they hiss and shriek insults at each other. Matt and Rolo promptly hold their hands up in the universal ‘I didn’t do it’ position with enormous shit eating grins plastered across their faces when Kolivan rounds on them as Nyma and Pidge twist and spit in the grasp of their captors. Hunk hustles Lance past the entire mess while their instructors have their hands full, shaking his head and laughing softly under his breath while Lance groans in utter humiliation.

Lance goes through his classes with his ears burning and face resolutely stuck in his notes, refusing to meet the eyes of his curious classmates. The whispers follow him everywhere he goes like particularly noisy snakes.

When he finally finds a way to sneak off to visit the pair of hellions in the infirmary Thace greets him at the door with an expression so impressively neutral it’s a judgement all on its own. He eyes Lance over his glasses in a manner that makes Lance’s shoulders hike up towards his ears. 

“This is not my fault,” he says before their school physician has a chance to say anything. “I swear I told her not to start anything.”

“Yes,” Thace replies in a low, measured voice that always seems to project complete confidence and command. “I imagine you did. Now if you could please take the pair of them out of my infirmary, I would appreciate it.”

“Yes, sir,” Lance mutters as he edges around Thace’s intimidatingly large form.

He’s stopped by a heavy hand on his shoulder and when he looks up in confusion and apprehension his gut twists at the gentle expression on Thace’s normally severe face. “Your meister will find you,” he says softly. “Never doubt that.”

That’s a new one, Lance thinks to himself. He’s heard pretty much every variation on the ‘there’s more fish in the sea’ line possible over the past three years, but this is the first time he’s been told that his meister will find him. 

He’s not sure he likes it. 

He finds a smile for his teacher—dredge it out of himself like the last bits of glimmer in a mine—and nods seriously. “Okay.”

Thace sighs like he’s being difficult though for the life of him Lance can’t see how and squeezes his shoulder hard once before releasing him. “If I see the pair of them in here again for this nonsense, I’ll have them running laps until their legs fall off.”

“I’ll tell them,” Lance says with a far sincerer grin. That’s definitely a conversation he’s looking forward to.

Thace pats his shoulder again and finally lets Lance eel past him to pull back the curtain shielding his friend and former meister. He sighs as they blink big, innocent eyes at him, cards held in their hands and an impressive array of candies spread between them.

“Your ex-slut cheats,” Pidge announces. Lance slaps a hand over his face and wonders precisely what he’s done to deserve having her inflicted upon his life. He’s a good boy. He holds open doors and escorts old people across roads. Does his homework on time. Definitely does not deserve to have one pint-sized ball of rage and murder make a mess of his life.

“Pidge,” he groans.

“ _I_ cheat,” Nyma squawks in indignant offense and holds her cards to her chest before pointing one perfectly manicured finger at Pidge. “Your homewrecking friend counts cards.”

“Nyma,” Lance groans.

When he drags his hand away from his face they both grin at him. Nyma has an impressive bruise colouring her jaw and a line of vicious furrows across her arm. Pidge has a split lip that bleeds sluggishly as she grins at him and the makings of a glorious shiner. They are both gloriously and vibrantly unrepentant—as pleased with themselves as cats that’d gotten the cream, catnip, and every mouse in the field. 

“How bad is it?” Nyma asks, studying her nails, and Lance has the sudden realization that Pidge may have done her a kindness dressed up as an ass-kicking. By viciously and publicly challenging her both dragged into light their fresh break up and delivered a punishment for the perceived sin.

With one messy, bloody, dirty fight she’d served as Nyma’s judge, jury and executioner in the eyes of their classmates. No one would be able to say much more than Pidge had already done. He shoots Pidge a glance and she raises one impossibly bored eyebrow at him. He shakes his head her before turning back to Nyma.

He reaches and tugs on her messy ponytail until she looks up at him. “Everyone’s talking about how a weapon kicked your ass around the courtyard.”

She sputters as Pidge crows in pleased triumph. 

Nyma waves a finger at Pidge’s battered face and huffs, “Look at her! Am I the one with the black eye? No!” Nyma pulls her hand back while Pidge snaps her teeth at the air it occupied not but seconds earlier. “If anything, I kicked her ass.”

“No way, slut. I broke your nose,” Pidge says.

Nyma sneers. “I dislocated your shoulder, homewrecker, and broke your glasses.”

Lance taps Nyma’s jaw, making her flinch away from his touch. “You are both very bad ass,” he soothes. “But maybe don’t brag about how you beat the hell out of each other in the middle of the infirmary?”

Both girls glance back over Lance’s shoulder when he jerks a thumb at their school physician who merely sighs. Lance can feel the force of Thace’s displeasure like echoes of a Soul Force blast and fights a groan when they both adopt thoughtful expressions bordering on insubordinate. Lance scrubs his face with one hand. The entire time he was partnered with Nyma he’d wished that the pair of them could just get along with each other—if only for an evening. It just figures that they would only start getting along now that Nyma’d broken their partnership. It makes a weird sort of sense that they would become friends only after they’d beaten the hell out of each other for committing the same sins. 

“Mr. Serrano,” Thace says in that perfectly calm tone that still manages to convey an impending storm. “If your companions are feeling so lively, perhaps now is the time to escort them back to class?”

Lance fights to not turtle up against the weight of that scorn. “Yep,” he says while making moves to gather up their things. “We’ll just, you know, vamoose.”

“Smooth, Lance,” Pidge mutters as she swats his hands away from her cards, quick fingers shuffling them into a tidy deck and making them disappear into the depths of her hoodie.

Nyma neatly divides the candies between them before bagging them up with quick and sure hands—not a movement wasted. He always did like that about her. She grins at Pidge, vicious and feral. “We should do this again,” she says as if Pidge’s agreement is a forgone conclusion. “But next time for money.”

“Sure,” Pidge agrees easily, her answering grin is sly and wicked. “I’ll clean you out, if you want.”

Lance looks between the two of them and suddenly feels like he’s the one that’s lost the plot.

\--

They walk Nyma to her meister specific classes, flanking her like a pair of bodyguards. Lance keeps up a running commentary about nothing in particular—mouth moving on autopilot about a random mix of pop culture news, gossip, and theories about why Professor Coran is as weird as he is (current theory: aliens)—and ignores the curious side-ways glances they get. Pidge, apparently dismissing the subtle approach for cowards and the weak, glowers at their fellow students with her black eye and split lip like a middle finger in everyone’s face, daring them to breath a word. 

No one does but Lance can feel the way everyone’s eyes track their progress. He can feel the pressure of the questions that everyone is dying to ask, weighting down their tongues like ravens at a graveyard, wonders if there will ever come a time when he can walk down the halls without gossip following him like a mangy hound. 

He starts when slender fingers find his, wrap around them, and hold as if they were the last solid thing Nyma would ever grasp. He glances down at her where she walks beside him, chin up and eyes forward as if nothing could touch her—glacier water ran in her veins, frost graced her skin like the finest blush, and ice in her pretty eyes. It’s moments like this, when her spine is made of steel and her chin a graceful arch of pride that he loves her. Loves her like he loves the sweep of the ocean or the spill of the Milky Way across the midnight sky. Loves her like he loves all things wild and fierce.

Lance tightens his grip around those delicately calloused fingers before releasing them again. He pretends he doesn’t see the way Nyma drags in a shaking breath as she stands in front of the door to the meister-only classes. He chucks her gently under the chin to make her roll her eyes and grumble at him. 

“You have this,” he tells her.

“You’re a fucking mess,” Pidge says with a grin so wide it re-opens the split on her lip and paints her bottom teeth an unsettling pink. “I kicked your ass.”

Fast as a snake strike and twice as vicious, Nyma drags her thumb across Pidge’s bottom lip, swiping through the blood before popping it into her mouth and sucking it clean. “So you say,” Nyma says in the face of Pidge’s baffled and overwhelmed sputtering. With one flick of her blonde ponytail she saunters into her classes with more sway in her step than a ship at sea.

Lance arches one eyebrow at Pidge who stands staring at the door, still sputtering faintly. “So that’s your type.”

“I can, and will, remove your intestines with a bit of bailing wire and a spoon,” Pidge says, low and ominous.

Lance puts both hands up with a grin and laughs when she punches him anyway. They wander their way back towards their own classes, shoulders bumping occasionally in agreeable closeness as other students slide out of their way with subtle sideways glances. He’s grateful for Pidge’s dismissive sneer and swagger—borrows her confidence like an ill-fitting coat. He hides behind her fierceness and disdain like an infantryman behind a bulwark and wonders, not for the first time and probably not for the last, what he did to deserve her unwavering friendship. 

Pidge stops him before they slide into the weapons’ only class. He lets her take his chin between two fingers and turn him this way and that as if checking him for damage. Lance can’t help but smile easy and fond at her unthinking possessiveness—her base assumption that he’s hers to inspect as she feels necessary. 

“You’re an idiot,” She says, her fingers like a vice on his jaw. “And you flirt with anything and everything—”

“Dang, girl,” he says, grinning at her. “Don’t get into my bad qualities.”

“Shut up, I’m being supportive,” she snaps.

“If this is supportive,” he tells her. “I am seriously concerned at your idea of indifferent.”

That earns him an impressive eyeroll. “Whatever,” she barks at him, dismissing his attempt to joke his way out of her concern. “Anyway. You might be an incorrigible flirt who hides how smart he is under stupid jokes and worse pick-up lines, but your meister will find you and they will be amazing.”

It’s the second time inside of an hour that someone has told him to wait for his meister—to trust that they would find him rather than telling him to go find them. Lance shakes his head as he holds the door open for her, earning himself a flinty glare and a huff. Pidge opens her mouth to further make her point, or argue, or something but Lance has had enough of well-meaning concern and gently, but firmly shoves her through the door while raising his voice to greet their instructor, effectively overriding any additional commentary Pidge might have.

She stomps heavily on his foot as she stomps through the door, grumbling about stupid, stubborn males under her breath as she goes. 

Instructor Ulaz gives the pair of them a cool look and waves a hand to the empty seats between Matt and Rolo. Lance fights to keep his shoulders from hunching up as sixty eyes peer down at them as they make their way. Pidge’s chin goes up in hot defiance and the grim set of her jaw promises a short, sharp conversation to the first person to crack a breathless whisper.

Rolo leans over to whisper into Lance’s ear, so close his breath ghosts Lance’s neck, making him shiver. “How is my girl?”

“Bruised jaw, cracked ribs, and a mild concussion,” Pidge croons back, her voice fat with satisfaction. “I fucked your girl _up_.”

Rolo rolls his eyes, “I didn’t ask you, short stack.”

Lance laughs as Pidge sputters in indignation at the nickname and places a placating hand on the top of her unruly curls. “She’s good. Ice in her veins, fire in her eyes, and the first person to say fuck all will get their eyes clawed out.”

“Good,” Rolo says as he sits back. “Thanks.”

Lance looks at the other weapon out of the corner of his eyes. Rolo slouches in his seat, a boy made of coat hangers and knife blades—all sharp lines and lazy edges—but Lance can see the tension thrumming across his shoulders, in the nervous bounce of his leg. He reaches out, easy and slow, and raps his knuckles against Rolo’s. “We’re cool.”

Rolo flashes him a look that Lance can’t quite read and returns the gesture. “Good, good.”

Lance wants to shake his head in bemused affection when the tension drains out of Rolo’s body like sand from a clenched fist until he’s a boneless tumble of limbs barely even his seat. They’re two sides of the same coin, Rolo and Nyma—false apathy draped across hearts that care entirely too much, affected disinterest to hide fragile feelings—and even through his hurt Lance can see how they just _fit_. He can’t help the soft half smile that etches itself across his face when Rolo’s sprawled legs edge into his personal space, his knee pressing against Lance’s thigh. It’s a subtle thing, like a cat sitting on a couch with you—close, but not too close.

Pidge snorts beside him and rolls her eyes at him. “Softie,” she accuses under her breath. 

He gives her a half shrug and ruffles her hair just to make her grumble and swat at him.

\--

The day moves oddly from point in time to point in time. It’s like a movie skipping over a bad connection—stuttering between frames.

Each time he blinks, Lance finds himself in a new scene.

Lance is both hyperaware of every murmur and sigh that dogs his step like a ghost after a forgetful lover, and completely deaf to the lecturing tones of their instructors. When he looks down at his notes they are full of random drawings, Pidge’s sarcastic commentary, and Rolo’s dry observations. He is at once hyper-focused and completely out to lunch—the disconnect leaves him off-center and out of sorts. 

He knows his friends can sense his distraction. Rolo catches his arm and guides him down the auditorium stairs, his ambling stride slow and steady, and Lance floats along in his wake. Pidge snaps and snarls at the curious who get too close—her sharp tongue driving away those who would bestow sympathetic words in hopes of unearthing some new gossip. Matt smiles and charms their teachers until his hands are full of lecture notes and their instructors watch them with gentle eyes.

Lance feels himself switch between completely engaged—teasing Pidge, trading increasingly terrible jokes with Rolo, leaning against Matt as he explains the mathematics behind Soul Resonance—and a thousand miles away. His consciousness feels tugged between two planes—the here and now, with his friends desperately trying to tether him down, down, down into the warmth of their grasp. And fifty-thousand feet above where his worries circle like enemy aircraft, ready to firebomb his precarious self-esteem.

He’s the only soul weapon in a generation, in three generations, to go through as many meisters as he has. The only one to fail over and over and _over_ at forging the soul connection that’s critical between weapon and meister. The only one to be within kissing distance of his majority and still unable to form a steady partnership. 

As much as he tries to ignore it, tries desperately to hang onto the faith his friends have in him, that lack eats at him in ways he can’t even articulate in his own head (in his heart).

Lance wonders idly, as Nyma races to join them—her ponytail flying behind her like a bright banner, if the betting pools will start up again. He wonders who won the last one. He thinks maybe that he should be insulted that people keep betting on the likelihood of his partnerships failing, but Lance gets it. He does. He’d bet on himself too if that wasn’t so painfully defeatist and his mama didn’t raise him like that. 

“Wake up, loverboy,” Nyma chirps as she cuffs him gently around the ears. “We got places t’be and people to see us.”

Lance checks back into his body with a full-body jerk—awareness jumping down his spine like electricity from a faulty socket—and blinks at her, her words registering slowly. “I’m pretty sure you mangled that saying,” he says in lieu of a greeting. “Almost positive.”

“I didn’t,” she replies, sparing a quick, soft smile for Rolo as he kisses her bruised knuckles—something inside Lance, right under his ribs, twangs painfully at the innocent gesture—before locking eyes at him as a slow smirk slides across her face. “I’ve found your meister for you and you need to put in a claim.”

He can’t help the immediate hunch of his shoulders, the automatic curling around his already damaged heart at the idea of forming a connection again— _too soon, too soon_ , the aching parts of him protest, _we can’t_ —but dredges up a smile for her as worry crowds into her pretty eyes. “Yeah, okay. Sure.”

That makes her purse her lips, eyes sweeping up and over him before shifting to Rolo. Whatever conversation they have happens in the smallest of gestures and the tiniest of breaths. He’s caught by the sudden flare of unexpected jealousy that springs up under his ribs, grabbing at his breath with small and petty hands, and he has to grind his knuckles into his breastbone to drive the tension away. He hates more than anything this part of the break-up process—seeing all the ways he just didn’t match his former meister. 

Rolo knocks his shoulder with one loose fist. “Ya don’t have to, ya know?”

He finds a smile for Rolo—manages to even make it real, make it sweet—because his bullshit doesn’t need to be their problem. “Nah. Like, I don’t think we’ll be a ‘fated match’ or whatever—I’m pretty sure at this point that’s kinda not in the cards for me, just statically speaking—but whoever this meister is, they’re transferring in right in the middle of the semester and that’s a bitch and half. So, can’t hurt to go say hi.” 

So, Lance has a tendency use words like verbal ink in the water when he’s hurting and hasn’t figured out what to do about it yet—words everywhere to mask the seeping hurt—sue him. There are worse coping mechanisms.

Rolo slowly tilts his head to the side as if trying to see Lance from a new angle before shaking his head slowly. “I see what you mean,” he says to Nyma, who makes a face. “How do you get him to stop?”

“Generally, people tell me to shut up to my face,” Lance complains.

That gets him the most synchronize eyeroll in the history of eyerolls. It’s so lovely Lance feels like it ought to be memorialized. Framed perhaps. A nice, tasteful walnut frame with a mahogany finish maybe. But definitely remembered. He may say something to the effect, earning himself twin looks of fond exasperation.

“Gods, you’re a piece of work,” Rolo says as Nyma hitches her fingers under the sleeves of Lance’s jacket and hauls him upright. “Why are you like this?”

“You want that list chronologically,” Lance shoots back, mouth running on autopilot—fueled by weird mix of nerves he can’t quite explain. “Or by order of importance?”

“Is he always like this?” Rolo asks Nyma as if he weren’t standing _right there_.

“He’s nervous,” Nyma says as she propels Lance down the auditorium stairs as if he were a particularly recalcitrant child. “He runs at the mouth when he gets nervous.” 

Lance wants to argue with that—he runs at the mouth _all_ the time, thanks—but Nyma has a hand fisted in his shirt right between his shoulder blades like an iron anchor. He sighs with exaggerated defeat and lets her direct him where she pleases.

“Dramatic,” Rolo says as he follows along in Nyma’s wake, “that’s what you are.”

“I’m a five act tragi-comedy written by a drunk Englishman. It’s true,” Lance agrees, mouth completely disconnected from his brain and whatever weak filtration system it might have over the words spilling out of his mouth like ink from a startled squid. “Honestly, it’s a damned shame that I’m not taught everywhere as an example of the form.”

“That … makes absolutely no sense even on the metric of your normal level of incomprehensible metaphors,” Rolo says, forehead creasing slowly as he tries and fails to follow Lance’s admitted word salad of a response.

“You do realize more than half of what comes out of my mouth is as much a surprise to me as it is to you, right?” Lance replies. Says it because it makes Rolo laugh his slow, rolling laugh that sounds the way chocolate tastes. Says it because it makes Nyma sigh, but her fist unfurls between his shoulders and her thumb rubs a slow sweep along his spine. And he says it because it’s true.

Kolivan doesn’t even blink at them as Nyma marches Lance right up to him, Rolo loping along behind them at his easy amble. He looks them over from where Nyma maintains her hold on Lance—hand pressed like a brand between his shoulders—to where Rollo stands at idle attention, like the world’s laziest bodyguard.

“Ms. Nye,” Kolivan greets her. “I would expect you to be keeping a low profile given your antics earlier this morning.”

Nyma runs the fingers of one hand through her ponytail and flicks it out so it flares and flutters. “And when have I kept a low profile, ever?”

“One does live in hope that you might learn the concept of discretion and subtlety, but, alas, it seems that lesson is slow to take,” Kolivan replies, but his tone is fondly amused for all the sharpness of his words. 

Nyma smiles at him, surprisingly sweet despite the glorious bruise riding her cheek and the way it cracks the cut on her lip. “I can be subtle when I need to be. And besides, half the time it’s just the art of making people look one way when you don’t want them to look the other.”

Kolivan narrows his eyes at her and makes a faint humming noise in the back of his throat that is neither an agreement nor a disagreement. Sometimes Lance wonders at their instructors’ ability to be so completely neutral. He wonders if it’s a condition of employment or if its something learned over the course of dealing with the high-strung antics of a couple hundred teenaged weapons and meisters. Chicken and the egg conundrum, he realizes idly, completely checking out of the conversation between Kolivan and his former meister. It’s not like anyone could survive teaching at DWMA without it.

“Did you agree to this, Mr. Serrano?” Lance jolts, full body flinch like he’d taken 100 volts straight through his spine, and blinks at Kolivan. 

“Er?” Lance says eloquently.

“Ms. Nye’s idea,” his instructor says with every indication of utmost patience. “Did you agree to it?”

“Errr,” Lance tries again, since the last time he attempted that conversational salvo it went so well.

Nyma makes a sound caught between a laugh and a frustrated huff. “Do you want to meet the new meister, or do you want to continue to sulk like a toddler.”

He scowls at Nyma, irritation instant and intense. “I’m not sulking.”

“Good! Then you’ll continue to not sulk by meeting the new meister,” Nyma says with a wide grin. Lance wants to scrub his face with both hands, or stick out his tongue, or something, but any of his options would reveal how expertly she’d played him—walked him right into a corner where he couldn’t disagree or charm his way out. So, he sighs and shrugs his shoulders a little.

A heavy hand on his shoulder drags his attention back to Kolivan who regards him with a thoughtful expression full of seriousness that he’s pretty sure he doesn’t merit. “You can take your time, if you wish. But it may not be a bad idea to meet her.”

Lance thinks of making a smarmy comment—is she pretty? Is she an angel fallen from heaven?—any number of things that would make Kolivan sigh and Nyma slap at him. But he can’t, quite, find the energy for it. So, he shrugs again and smiles. “It can be hard to come in during the middle of the semester. No harm in showing her a friendly face.”

For some reason that makes Nyma’s face twist and she tangles her fingers with his, laying her head against his shoulder. “You’re too _nice_.”

“You keep saying that like it’s a bad thing,” he tells her, thoroughly bemused.

Kolivan makes that thoughtful noise again, dragging their attention back to him. “An unexpected show of maturity, Mr. Espinosa,” he says and Lance thinks there might be a smile lurking at the edges of his mouth when Lance makes an exaggerated face at him. “But your kindness will be, I think, appreciated.”

He doesn’t have time to turn over Kolivan’s odd words, because their instructor is already turning on one heel and marching towards the instructors’ offices with grim purpose burning tension across his shoulders. Lance doesn’t have time to wonder about that either—poke at the curious way Kolivan’s gone closed and tense, like he expects an attack in the middle of the lecture hall filled with bright chatter and soft sunlight. 

Lance shoots a look at Nyma who shakes her head at him, the same worry blooming in his chest writ across her narrow features.

But it’s a worry that’ll have to keep for another time. Kolivan’s already on the far end of the room, his long legs eating distance at a speed that makes them trot to catch up. Lance chances a glance up at his shuttered expression. There’s a weird pressure in the air, a sense of anticipation and it’s not just normal butterflies-in-the-stomach at the idea of meeting a new meister.

Kolivan puts a hand on his office door and turns to study his students, his gaze distant and, if Lance was pressed, worried. It almost feels like Kolivan’s taking careful inventory of each and every one of his students—placing them all in a mental index as if at any time he expects to lose one or all of them.

And there’s an idea that sends ice straight through Lance’s veins. 

Just as Lance is opening his mouth, trying to find the right words to prod their instructor into giving some idea of what’s eating at him, Kolivan opens the door to his office and all of Lance’s worries and thoughts slide straight into a brick wall of _woah_.

Her eyes, when she turns to look at them, are the deep and endless blue of the ocean at sunset. Her hair, spilling over her shoulders to her hips in heavy waves, is the pure white of untouched snow. Her spine is a tall, proud arch and her shoulders straight and firm as she regards them with casual disinterest.

The girl standing in the middle of Kolivan’s office is, quite frankly, the most magnificent thing he’s ever seen.

Which is probably why he manages to trip on air and faceplant straight into the floor at her feet.

“How are you this clumsy, Serrano?”

And of course Keith Kogana—DWMA’s wunderkind meister—is there to watch him trip over his own feet like an idiot. He catches Lance before he can complete his faceplant and hauls him roughly back up to his feet. They stare at each other for a moment until Lance raises an eyebrow and Keith lets him go with a quiet huff.


	7. Adventures in Small Batch Brewing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cute fluffy thing that I started before s3, poked a bunch, and then gave up because canon just jossed the fuck out of everything and i'm allergic to fluff anyway

Adventures in Small Batch Brewing

C_6 H_12 O_6 (Glucose) 

Hunk sniffs the jar of electric pink syrup with hopeful trepidation. It _smells_ right—faintly floral, sweet, and with an under tone of something earthy. With a glance at the shopkeeper, who gives him a very enthusiastic nod—all the locals are very excited to be helpful to the Paladins of Voltron—Hunk dips a finger into it and licks it off with a thoughtful hum. It doesn’t taste quite right, but, _maybe_ …

“Hey, Lance,” he calls holding out his hand with pink syrup still clinging to it. “Try this and tell me if it reminds you of anything.”

Lance wanders over with an openly curious expression, body language all relaxed helpfulness. Sometimes Hunk wonders how he managed to end up such an easy-going best friend when he’s a screaming mess of distrust and anxiety. Lance eyes the offering of alien, neon pink syrup with a faint smirk and closes his lips over Hunk’s finger, pulling off with a wet pop. From across the room Hunk notices Keith going faintly pink around the tips of his ears. He rolls his eyes at Lance who, with customary lack of anything remotely like shame, smiles with all the guilelessness of the innocent. 

“Well,” Hunk prompts.

“Almost like honey,” Lance agrees to the unspoken question because he’s good like that. “Like, if honey had a lovechild molasses.”

“Yeah,” Hunk hums thoughtfully, dipping another finger into the jar to taste the syrup again. He rolls his eyes at Lance’s suggestively arched eyebrow before turning back to the hovering shopkeeper. “You said this was made from the extract of …?”

The shopkeeper lights up sensing a potential sale and thus the bragging rights of being a vendor to the Castle of Lions, before launching into a very obviously practiced spiel about the harvesting process of what he called _meod_. Hunk nods along to the explanation, gleaning that the syrup was produced much the same way as maple syrup—sap harvested from large trees and rendered into a sweet syrup. If he was right then it should have the right glucose content.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking,” he asks Lance, still contemplating the jar.

“Tocinillo del Cielo?” Lance replies, wistfulness a tangible thing.

Hunk looks up and blinks, making a mental note of a new method to ease Lance’s homesickness. “Nah, I mean I think I can already make those with what we picked up from Arus.” At Lance’s happy gasp, Hunk adds double underlines to his mental note. “I’m thinking more of our freshman year experiments.”

They both blink at Keith’s sudden sputtered coughing.

“You okay over there, dude?” Lance calls, voice nothing but sweet concern even as his lips curl into an evil grin. Well, evil if you know what to look for, which Hunk definitely does. It’s a subtle glint in Lance’s eyes, a sharpness to his smile that shows his white, white teeth like a threat. Hunk swats the back of Lance’s head.

“Dude. _Mead_.”

“Ooooh, _that_ freshmen experimenting,” Lance purrs. Hunk rolls his eyes and raises his hand again. Lance ducks back with a laugh while Keith sputters harder. “But fuck yeah, my main man, we should have another go at that. I mean, at least the mead didn’t explode.”

“I’m pretty sure I can correct the distillation process so we don’t make the bourbon explode again, but I don’t want to wait, like, 15 years for a drink,” Hunk replies thoughtfully. Building a still had proven to be more challenging than he originally planned back at Garrison, but with the Castle’s resources he wouldn’t be reduced to boot-strapping a pressure cooker into an alembic. 

Pot distillation. Never again. 

He plunks down the jar in front of shopkeeper, who positively vibrates with poorly suppressed glee. “I’ll take as many pounds of that as you have available.”

Keith sidles up to him while he haggles with shopkeeper (because fuck no he’s not paying whatever price they’d first chirped up at him, his moms had taught him better than that at the farmers’ market), all bashful curiosity and awkwardness. Hunk’s long since figured out that it’s best to treat Keith like slightly feral cat. No sudden movements, soft words, and keep loud (Lance) sudden (Lance) startling (Lance) events to minimum and Keith’ll open up on his own time. 

By the time Hunk’s worked the shopkeeper down to a price that they were both unhappy with—compromise: the art of ensuring that no one is happy—Keith’s talked himself around to asking whatever question was rattling around in his pretty little head. 

“What’s mead?” Keith asks, eyeing the massive jars of electric pink syrup the shopkeeper was stacking like they might suddenly morph into Galra drones and attack them.

“It’s booze, dude,” Lance says, obviously delighted to take the opportunity to show up Keith—even on something so small. 

Hunk catches the back of Lance’s jacket and directs him towards the door. “Help haul the jars back to the Castle, please.”

Lance huffs at him. “Do I look like your personal porter?” Lance flails his arms around. “Look at my delicate physique! I am not meant for manual labour.”

“Take this as the opportunity to build upper body strength then,” Hunk tells him blandly. They stare at each other for a while before Lance heaves a massive sigh, defeated.

“I don’t know why I let you boss me around like this,” he gripes while hauling a pair of jars up into his arms and not-quite-waddled out the door with them.

“Because I feed you, repair your lion, build you adapters for your video games, listen to your bitching, and in general love you,” Hunk replies without missing a beat. “Do you want me to keep going?”

Lance sighs around his armful of alien honey-substitute. “No. Love you too.”

Keith watches the pair of them with something that Hunk thinks looks very like envy before he quickly guards his expression when he catches Hunk looking. Internally Hunk heaves a sigh. He isn’t sure what the inside of Keith’s head looks like—he was pretty sure _Keith_ doesn’t know what the inside of his head looks like—but he’s fairly sure all of the emotional repression Keith does isn’t healthy for anyone. Keith fidgets minutely next to him, shooting him little glances from under the wild fringe of his hair.

“Mead is a type of alcohol made by fermenting honey,” Hunk says, handing Keith a pair of jars. Keith handles conversations better when he has something to do with his hands. Hunk’d figured that one out after forcing the other boy to mix cookie batter until he worked his way around to asking why Hunk and Lance hugged as often as they did. “Well, honey and something to give it flavor—generally some sort of fruit. I was thinking maybe those little purple berries we got from Eris 6.”

Keith grunts a little bit as he maneuvers the jars into a more comfortable position. “The ones that tasted like raspberries?”

“Those are the ones,” Hunk confirms. “I think I have a solid four or five pints. And if I can find a decent ale pail to do a small batch—and yeast energizer. Man, that’s definitely a thing that I’m gonna have to find—then I’ll need, like, fifteen pounds of honey, distilled water—which is stupid easy now that we’ve figured out the Castle’s water filtration system—yeast, nutrient, energizer, and uh, something that I’m forgetting.”

Keith lets him ramble all the way to the Castle only making faint noises to indicate he’s listening, but not really attempting to interject. Hunk likes that about Keith—his ability to just _listen_ without any apparent need to participate. It’s relaxing to be able to just give voice to his thought process without any interruption. He loves Lance. He really, really does. Would be totally and completely lost without Lance’s steadying presence—always excited, always optimistic—but sometimes it’s nice to be able to just talk through his thoughts without any interruption or derailment.

Speaking of the devil, Lance watches them trudge their bright pink cargo up the Castle steps with a fond expression. “Thinking?” He asks, affection thick in his tone.

“Yeah,” Hunk grunts as he maneuvered four of the jars into a stable configuration. By his count he’s bought at least two hundred pounds of honey-substitute. While he’s definitely planning to direct some of it towards his new brewing project, most of it he’s already got mentally marked for desserts and pastries. Which were increasingly critical, Hunk’s discovering, for the continued well-being of Voltron. 

Lance leans out over the railing so far Hunk's seriously worried that he's at risk of falling off and plummeting to his untimely demise. "About what?"

Hunk hip-checks one the jars of honey-substituted into proper alignment. "Mead. Desserts. Whether or not this honey actually ferments the way that Earth honey does."

Lance laughs, ringing and delighted. Hunk notes with vague amusement the way that Keith's ears go a little pink at the sound. "Sounds complicated, my man. Are you going to chart out the chemical equations of fermentation of space honey?"

While Lance's tone is teasing, Hunk gives the question serious contemplation. It isn't a bad idea for all that Lance isn't even remotely serious about it. He can probably wrangle Pidge into helping him figure out the chemical composition of the space-honey he'd just bought. If he knows its composition, then he can figure out the PH. If he can figure out the PH, then he can figure out relative rate of fermentation. If he can figure out _that_ then he can probably figure out how to jury-rig something that looked like a yeast nutrient. 

Hunk beams up at Lance. "Yeah, maybe. Come help me with rest of the space-honey."

Lance rolls his eyes. "Make Keith do it."

Keith drops his jars of space-honey hard enough to make Hunk frown at him. Stuff is expensive and Hunk is already dreading telling Allura he's blown most of the food allowance for this diplomatic mission on space-honey. Keith hunches his shoulders up near his ears. "I'm already helping."

Hunk places a hand on Keith's shoulder and squeezes gently, noting how it makes the other paladin go still and soft. "Thanks, man. Lance and I can handle the rest, but it'd go faster if you want to stick around to help."

Keith regards him with wide, solemn eyes--Keith's expression is almost always solemn unless it's pissed off--and then he nods. "I'm already helping," he repeats quietly, as if he expects to be corrected. "I can keep helping. I'm not doing anything else."

Hunk gives his shoulder another squeeze before shouting up at Lance. "Come get your lazy ass in gear, pretty boy."

"I _am_ pretty. That means I shouldn't be used for manual labour!" Lance shouts back, though he's already hopping his way down the Castle steps at a speed that really does worry Hunk. It'd be so easy for Lance to snap an ankle--or his neck--with a wrong step. 

"You want booze? Then you help haul honey," Hunk says with mock severity. "I can always use Keith as a test subject."

Keith gives him an alarmed look while Lance whines piteously. "Noooo, Hunk! You love me best. There's no call to go cheating on me with mullets that you know have no taste."

"Keith’s been helping me with no whining," Hunk replies serenely. "Maybe I'll just have him test things since he won't complain the entire time."

It's a little mean, Hunk thinks to himself, to drag Keith into Lance's and his low-key teasing when he clearly has no idea what's going on. His pretty eyes are wide with trepidation though he's said not a word as he trudges back to the shop beside them. Hunk half expects him to snap and argue with Lance out of self-preservation and social anxiety, but Keith keeps quiet as he lopes alongside them, nearly at a trot to keep up with their longer legs. 

Hunk knows Lance's noticed Keith's silence from the way he wraps his arms around one of Hunk's and leans into him with a piteous expression. "Hunk! How could you play me like this? You know you love me best."

"I'm not sure I do," Hunk teases back. "Keith probably doesn't steal covers. And he probably won't whine about neon coloured food."

Hunk's amusement Keith's blink and sudden colouring at the covers comment probably makes him a bad person--or at the very least friends with Lance Espinosa for far, far too long. But it's just too _easy_ to make the other paladin off-center and cutely confused. They keep up their mock-fighting--Hunk pretending to be distant and two heartbeats from dropping Lance for Keith, while Lance whines and clings, all the way back to the shop. Keith shooting them confused and increasingly flustered looks as they walk. 

Hunk decides it's time to bring it back down once they reach the shop out of concern that Keith might actually drop one of the jars out of sheer flustered confusion. He and Lance are probably bad, bad men for what they do to Keith. They really are. It's far too easy turn the boy into a confused, blushing mess, but at the same time it's so adorable Hunk can't help but play along with Lance. Besides, he reasons to himself, it ever really becomes a problem Shiro will probably sort them out.

Probably.

Hunk hauls four jars into his arms, two stacked precariously atop one another, and waits for Keith to shimmy out the door he holds open with his hip--his jar of space-honey clutched in his arms like a cargo of precious stones. Though with what Hunk has paid for it, it might as well be.

"Have you ever had mead?" Hunk asks as they trot back to the Castle. Keith blows his hair out of his eyes and shakes his head. "Huh. What type of alcohol do you like then?"

Keith shifts his jar of space-honey a little before answering. "I, uh, didn't really drink while we were on Earth. I mean, we were too young?"

Hunk blinks as Lance laughs. "You're killing your bad-boy image there, mullet!"

Keith's mouth twists to one side as he side-eyes the pair of them. "I don't have a bad-boy image and we’re still too young."

Hunk shrugs, making his jars clink together a little. "My moms’ had me trying wine and stuff since I was, like, 13. And the state legislature switched the drinking age back to 18 after the Unification Wars anyway. Besides, people only get stupid with alcohol because puritanical cultural norms make such a big deal out of drinking. If you treat it like any other food and have some sense of self-control then it's not a big deal."

He watches Keith process this for a while before he says: "So basically, not Lance?"

Hunk laughs while Lance squawks and protests loudly, defending his alcohol tolerance. He lets Lance ramble on for a while--proudly proclaiming both his heritage and Cuba's long rum tradition--before breaking in. "Nah, my man, Keith is right. You don't really have much tolerance. Way too skinny for it."

"Not all of us have the tolerance of Norse god there, dude," Lance replies, defensiveness and affection lacing his tone. 

"Wouldn't that be having the tolerance of _Kane_?" Hunk asks, more rhetorical than anything else. He doesn’t really expect anyone to remember obscure Hawaiian gods no one has really thought about in a couple hundred years.

"Isn't that the god that drank, like, 40 gallons of _okolehao_ and then fell asleep in front of the sun causing a three-day eclipse?" Lance muses. 

Hunk laughs again--a deep, full belly laugh that causes his jars of honey to clink together alarmingly--amazed at the things that Lance remembers. "Yeah, that's the one."

Lance sucks his bottom lip between his teeth before releasing it with a faint pop. "Do you think we could make _okolehao_? Or, like, rum? Mead is cool and all, but it's such an anglo drink."

"We can probably make rum if we can make mead. I mean, rum is basically just mead on steroids anyway." Hunk muses--more thinking aloud than anything else. "It's basically just molasses, brown sugar, EC-1118 yeast and, like, a pot distillation. I mean," Hunk shifts the jars as they hike up the stairs, politely ignoring the way the other two boys huff the entire way up the Castle's walk way, "I kinda want to try my hand at making a full still anyway—one that doesn’t blow up."

Lance crows in delight as he sets his jar down and pumps his fist in victory. "Yessss, Cuba Libres for victory!" Lance eyes him as he flops out across the jars of honey. "But no _okolehao_?"

Hunk shakes his head and tries to ignore the sudden pang in his heart--sudden attack of indigestion, he tells himself. "Nah, man, I'd like to, but _okolehao_ can only be made from ti root and where are we gonna find that all the way out here?"

He feels a slight tug on his sleeve and finds Keith holding it with two fingers, gentle and surprisingly sweet. Keith doesn't look at him, keeps his gaze at their feet, but his hold is steady. "What's ti root?"

This boy, Hunk thinks to himself amused beyond words, this awkward, awkward boy. He shares a look with Lance over Keith's head. "Ti root is from the La'i plant. It's like a type of palm tree?"

“Thing is bad _ass_ ,” Lance adds helpfully. “Like, if you don’t do the fermentation process right it’ll make you hallucinate.”

“That’s an urban legend and you know it,” Hunk retorts. “La’i is perfectly fine, just not particularly tasty unless you cure it.”

Lance makes rude noise and leans around Hunk to whisper in fake-conspiratorial tones to Keith. “Don’t believe him, it’ll totally make you hallucinate if it’s prepared wrong.”

Hunk swats the back of Lance’s head while the other boy snickers. Keith eyes the two of them like he’s not sure whether or not he’s being fucked with. (He is.) “I don’t think Shiro will like the idea of brewing alcohol,” he says with doubt a tangible thing in his tone. “And I know he won’t like anything that actually makes you hallucinate.”

Lance cackles in delight. “You are such a _good_ boy! This is, like, the best discovery after Blue.”

Keith’s face goes an immediate and alarming shade of red. “I’m just thinking about Voltron! We can’t defend the universe if we’re all, like, messed up. And, and, and. You know what. Shut up.”

“You’re _such_ a _good_ boy,” Lance croons while Keith’s face steadily turns the colour of his jacket. “All this time and none of us ever knew. That’s the real secret of Keith Kogane. Never mind being part-Galra.”

Hunk catches Keith’s fist before he can plow it straight into Lance’s smirking face. “Okay, that’s enough, I think.” He hangs onto Keith’s fist easily as he tugs it petulantly and swats the back of Lance’s head, who just grins at him with open delight. “Either take this to the training room or settle down because if you break my jars of space-honey I will break _you_.”

He’s gratified that both boys eye him faint alarm and back away from the neon pink _meod_. Lance holds up his hands, “Carino, mi vida, no call to be bringing out the gun show just because Keith is a secret altar boy.”

Hunk sighs when Keith’s head snaps around to glower at Lance so fast Hunk is surprised he didn’t pull a tendon. “Training Room. Now,” Keith grinds out. “I’ll show you ‘altar boy’.”

Lance looks like all his Christmas’ have come early and before he can decide on how to respond to Keith’s seething challenge—Hunk has got to teach that awkward boy the concept of innuendo so he’ll stop setting things up for Lance like this—Hunk covers his mouth with one hand. “No,” he tells Lance gently, who whines at him like a puppy denied a favorite treat. “And you can keep licking me, I’m immune to it at this point.”

Hunk holds on as Lance squirms around, licks his hand like he’s eight, and whines until he finally just collapses against Hunk as if all his bones had suddenly been removed from his body. “Keith,” Hunk asks gently. “Could you go ask Coran for one of those motorized cart things? I wanna get the space-honey into the kitchen and make medovik for Allura before she figures out exactly how much I spent.”

Keith watches him and Lance with a complicated expression that Hunk is gonna have to sit down and decipher at some point. But whatever internal thought process going on behind those pretty dark eyes doesn’t make it out his mouth. “Medovik?”

“Remember the little honey cakes I made when we got back from Olkari last time?” At Keith’s nod, Hunk smiles. “Those. That’s medovik. Or smetannik. No one can agree on the name.”

“Oh,” Hunk can see the moment the light bulb goes off for Keith. “You’re gonna bribe her.”

“Yup.”

“You’re _sneaky_ ,” Keith says with something close to awe. 

Hunk can feel Lance’s eye roll as if he’d managed to do it with his whole body. He tightens his hold on Lance minutely until he can feel the other boy go slack again. “Please, Keith?”

He doesn’t let go of Lance until Keith disappears out the hanger, hopefully to find Coran. Then he wipes his hand on his shorts, making a face. “What are you, ten?”

Lance makes a distinctly unimpressed face. “Dude, you can’t think for a second I wouldn’t lick the shit out of your hand for that.” Hunk doesn’t bother to dignify that with a response as Lance stretches out his lanky limbs, twisting until his shoulders pop alarmingly. “Like, I don’t get why people always assume you aren’t sneaky. You’re friends with me. You’re friends with _Pidge_. But, like, everyone assumes that you are this innocent cuddle bear. I mean, you are a cuddle bear, but you are also a sneaky cuddle bear, and…”

Hunk’s not ashamed to say he tunes out as Lance rambles in mock-offence on his behalf. He lets the sound of Lance’s voice—rising and falling like the seas—wash over him and provide the background music to his plotting.  
   
Saccaromyces Cerevisiae (Brewer’s Yeast)

There’s something deeply satisfying to the process of baking, Hunk thinks to himself as he measures out the flour replacement—one that had the binding properties of gluten but didn’t seem to set off Pidge’s allergy. (Pidge’s reaction to that discovery still makes Hunk grin.) You follow the steps. You do not deviate. Everything flowing logically from point A to point B. And at the end you have a finished product. 

A _tasty_ finished product. 

Hunk’s a big fan of baking.

It’d taken him a while to figure out a form of yeast that didn’t either 1) develop its own intelligence if heated, 2) refused to rise for love nor money, or 3) exploded. Exploding cookies are much less fun in practice than in theory. He still feels personally attacked by that. Something in the heating/cooling process resulted in an unstable chemical bond between the sugars. Shiro’d been very interested in the practical applications of that until he’d slunk out Hunk’s kitchen under the weight of Hunk’s judgmental stare.

Hunk has Feelings ™ about weaponized food. Those feelings can pretty much be summed up with ‘don’t.’

He hums tunelessly while kneading something that promised to become a light, flakey pastry if he beat on the dough enough. Keith slides into the kitchen right as Hunk is in the middle of repeatedly dropping the dough onto the counter. Keith watches for a half second longer and then says, with his typical eloquence: “Um?”

“Impact force helps strengthen the not-gluten-gluten bonds through the dough,” Hunk grunts as he drops the dough again and then rolls it. “Makes the dough nice and light. Otherwise it’ll sit like a brick.”

“And be useful to replace the scaultrite lens if we need them?” Keith says with a hint of a grin curling around the edges of his mouth. 

Hunk points at him with one not-flour-flour covered finger. “Don’t even. I will leave you in the belly of a Weblum.”

Keith’s faint smile breaks into a full grin. “Good thing I know how to get out of those things, then, yeah?”

“I’ll stop feeding you,” Hunk warns. “You’ll get to eat whatever Coran cooks up. I won’t send you care packages when you go play hooky with Blade.”

“Now there’s a real threat,” Keith says with, as far as Hunk can tell, complete seriousness. “And I’m not playing hooky when I’m on Blade missions. Those are important.”

Hunk side-eyes him for a moment and rolls the dough again. “Sure.”

Keith scowls. “They are.”

“And no one else among the Blade can do them,” Hunk says and rolls the dough with maybe a bit more force than it really deserves. “Only you.”

Keith mutters something low under his breath that Hunk is about 85% sure is impolite. “And you guys need me for Voltron missions so much,” Keith mutters, tone low and vicious. “Shiro—”

Hunk waves one not-flour covered finger. “Is not you. Lance is not you. There are missions where we need _you_ , not just as a pilot, but as a paladin—as a person. You get that right?”

He ignores the way Keith scowls at countertops.


End file.
